[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/Dawson_David.jpg” caption=”Dr. Donald Dawson will present the Britton Lectures from March 27 to 30. Photo courtesy of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics.”]Complex systems are part of everyday life. Stock markets, communication networks, social networks, the structure of DNA, the evolving universe are just a few examples of such systems.

A major task of modern science is to understand, to analyzes, and to predict the behaviour of these complex systems. Often probabilistic models are used to describe such systems and Brownian motion is one of the most common such models.

Brownian motion was first introduced to explain the apparently random movement of pollen grains floating in water. It has been used to describe mutations in biology, signals in communication, stock prices in finance and molecule motion in fluid mechanics. It even finds applications in the latest wonders of nanotechnology.

Imagine now a model built from individual pieces, each one of which is modelled by Brownian motion. This is clearly a complex system. To deal with such systems, one is led to a branch of mathematics called the measure-valued process in which a fundamental model is the Dawson-Watanabe process.

From Tuesday, March 27 to Friday, March 30, McMaster's Department of Mathematics and Statistics will host Dr. Donald A. Dawson from Carleton University, who is a pioneer and the world leader in measure-valued process.

He will present the annual Britton Lectures, a series of four lectures on the development of stochastic dynamics and measure-valued process.

Dawson is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute. He was a Killam Senior Research Scholar, held a Max Planck Award for International Cooperation and won the CRM-Fields Prize.

He has published more than 100 papers and seven monographs, and has given many prestigious lectures, including the Gold Medal Lecture of the Statistical Society of Canada, the Jeffery-Williams Lecture of the Canadian Mathematical Society, an invited lecture at the 1994 International Congress of Mathematicians, a plenary lecture at the 1996 World Congress of the Bernoulli Society in Vienna and the Fields Institute Distinguished Lecture Series in the Statistical Sciences in 2003.

He has held faculty positions at McGill University and Carleton University and served as the director of the Fields Institute from 1996 to 2000. He is currently Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor at Carleton University and Adjunct Professor at McGill University.