Random Interactions

Fractal dimentions of watersheds

by Prof. Peter Grassberger (Juelich Research Centre, Germany)

Wednesday, November 7, 2012 from to (Asia/Kolkata)
at Colaba Campus ( A304 )
Description
The statistical properties of watersheds (e.g. in the Himalayans) have
been studied by geograpers since several decades, and it was realized
quite early that they are fractal with dimensions roughly between 1.1
and 1.2. In the talk I will discuss the case of random landscapes
bounded between two drainage sinks.  I will present three different
microscopic definitions of the watershed, that all have the same
dimension but have vastly different corrections to scaling, and need
different algorithms for efficient simulations. The numerically
obtained fractal dimensions (both in 2 dimensions and in a
generalization to 3-d) seem to fall into no known universality class.