Dr. Fred Molz, Research Professor and Distinguished Scientist Emeritus, was a featured speaker at the International Conference on Rheology and Fluid Mechanics in Alicante, Spain. The conference, which took place November 10-11, 2016, had the theme “Unifying Statics and Dynamics of Fluids.” Dr. Molz gave the keynote presentation entitled “An Exploratory Mathematical Analysis of Deterministic Chaotic Dynamics in a Four-Component Microbial System.” This was followed by a 2nd presentation entitled “On Organized Complex Systems, Chaotic Dynamics and Emergence in Natural Systems.” Dr. Molz’s interdisciplinary research, in close collaboration with Dr. Boris Faybishenko, a soil physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, uses mathematical models to help understand biological systems and other coupled, nonlinear systems. In such systems, the system component changes with time (dynamics) influence each other in a generally non-proportional (nonlinear) manner, so the overall field is called “Nonlinear Dynamics.” This conference is held annually at various locations, and Dr. Molz represented Clemson in front of a broad international audience composed of fluid mechanics and rheology experts from countries including Russia, Japan, Colombia, Iran and others.
