Mini-Symposium: Entropy Methods in Thermodynamics

Monday 26 - Wednesday 28 November 2007

 

Program

Each talk will include 5 to 10 minutes of question and discussion time, at the speaker's discretion.

	Monday 26 November	Tuesday 27 November
8:45 - 9:15	Registration	Registration
9:15 - 10:10	Keynote: Frank den Hollander (Leiden) Entropy: a central concept	Keynote: Ingo Müller (TU Berlin) Entropy in non-equilibrium
10:10 - 10:40	Debra Bernhardt (Griffith) Fluctuation relations, the dissipation function and entropy	Alexander Fradkov (Russian Academy of Science) Speed-gradient-entropy modeling of nonstationary processes
10:40 - 11:00	Morning Tea	Morning Tea
11:00 - 11:30	Keynote: Ingo Müller (TU Berlin) Entropy: a subtle concept in thermodynamics	Bob Dewar (ANU) Plasma relaxation principles
11:30 - 12:00	Ingo Müller (continued)	Alison Ord (CSIRO) Non-equilibrium thermodynamics and the coupling between deformation and chemical reactions
12:00 - 12:30	Nana Liu (Melbourne) Can micromechanical and statistical mechanics descriptions coexist in the context of sheared granular materials?	12:00 - 12:50 Keynote: Gary Morriss (UNSW) The thermodynamics of nonequilibrium steady states
12:30 - 1:45	Lunch
1:45 - 2:40	Keynote: Derek Robinson (ANU) Entropy and uncertainty	Afternoon Free
2:40 - 3:10	Frederico Frascoli (Swinburne) Chaotic properties of nonequilibrium liquids under planar shear and elongational flows
3:10	Afternoon tea

The program continues on Wednesday 28th, combined with some talks on Entropy in Partial Differential equations. Click here to view.

Keynote speakers

FRANK DEN HOLLANDER presently is Chair of Probability at Leiden University, The Netherlands. He is affiliated with EURANDOM, a European institute for research in the stochastic sciences, in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, where he supervises the research program "Random Spatial Systems". From 2000 to 2005 he was scientific director of EURANDOM.

Professor den Hollander is co-author of 100 research papers in probability theory, mathematical statistical physics, and ergodic theory, and of 2 monographs on large deviations and on random polymers. He is on the advisory council of several national and international research institutions, and is acting as chair of a number of national and international research programs. He is member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences.

 

INGO MUELLER is a physicist who has spent forty years teaching thermodynamics in four countries (USA, Mexico, Italy and Germany). For thirty years he was professor of technical thermodynamics at the Technical University Berlin. During that time he studied and taught all aspects of thermodynamics from the construction and operation of heat engines and refrigerators to the modelling of the thermo-mechanical behaviour of shape memory alloys, the swelling of poly-electrolytes, and the light scattering in extremely rarefied gases. He developed Extended Thermodynamics, which is essentially a thermodynamic theory of irreversible processes in rarefied gases; the theory is characterized by attractive mathematical properties such as symmetric hyperbolic field equations.

Professor Müller is author of ten books an different aspects of thermodynamics, the newest one deals with the history of the subject. He has been an Emeritus Professor since 2005. His students are teaching thermodynamics in universities of many countries.

 

C. ANGAS HURST was for 30 years Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Adelaide, in association with H.S. Green. He published widely in many aspects of mathematical physics and built up an international reputation in the field. He was also a Visiting Fellow at many prestigious international institues and universities. He was on the executive of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics and the committee of the International Association of Mathematical Physics. In 1984-85 he was Vice President of the Australian Academy of Science and 1986-88 Pro Vice Chancellor of the Uiversity of Adelaide.

Angas Hurst sends his apologies. He is not able to come to Melbourne as his wife is very ill.

 

DEREK ROBINSON began his career in Oxford as a theoretical nuclear physicist and subsequently worked on quantum field theory and statistical mechanics. After ten years as Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Aix--Marseille he moved to Australia in 1978 as Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of New South Wales. In 1982 he accepted a similar position at the Australian National University where he remains as Emeritus Professor subsequent to his retirement in 2000.

He was Chairman of the Board of the Institute of Advanced Studies for four years covering the
Dawkins holocaust of higher education and has served as President of the Australian Mathematical
Society and Chair of the National Committee of Mathematics of the Australian Academy of Science.
He has published some 170 research papers and 6 books in a variety of areas of mathematics and
physics. His most notable achievements are publishing with Ola Bratteli the now classic two-volume work
`Operator Algebras and Quantum Statistical Mechanics' and winning the individual cycling time trial
at the World Masters Games in Melbourne in 2002.

 

Organising committee

Prof. Philip Broadbridge, AMSI
Prof. Tony Guttmann, MASCOS

More information

Email Graham Keen, AMSI at

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