Economists thinking about anything from housing policy to climate change need to model how people make decisions, especially when facing uncertainty and risk. Read more →
Economics had its critics even before the financial crisis of a decade ago. Since then doubt has grown over how much economists really know. Much of economics rests on analyses of how individuals – as consumers, or in managing a business, for example – make supposedly optimal decisions in uncertain situations. Read more →
Variations in the strength of gravity over the Earth’s surface reflect underlying geophysical changes such as groundwater change, surface vertical deformation, tectonic events, earthquakes and other processes. To study such processes, so-called gravity survey campaigns collect observations made repeatedly at fixed stations. Read more →
High-profile data horror stories are becoming increasingly common, from Facebook’s relationship with Cambridge Analytica to the leak of UK diplomatic cables and massive security breaches at some of the world’s biggest companies. Read more →
Some of the strongest challenges for numerical weather prediction come from the unsteady nature of certain flows, in particular nocturnal and stable boundary layers. Read more →
When steam condenses from vapour into liquid, the water molecules move closely together and the system, from a mathematical point of view, comes to reside in an extremely small portion of the conceptually available phase space. Read more →
Telecommunications engineers and operations researchers aim to manage complex and fluctuating traffic flows through extended networks. Among other techniques, they have exploited results from the theory of large deviations to estimate the likelihood that a demand in service will overflow the available resources. Read more →
Systems out of equilibrium typically carry macroscopic currents of particles, mass or energy. Thermodynamic uncertainty relations offer universal bounds linking such currents and their statistical fluctuations to other system properties, especially entropy production. Read more →
Probability theory emerged in the second half of the 17th century as a way to think about monetary gambles, and how to choose wisely when facing uncertainty. Early thinking suggested that people would act so as to maximise the expected change in wealth – an average over all possible outcomes. Read more →
Point processes offer a convenient mathematical representation of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, crimes and many other processes which occur at random times and locations. The data available in these fields has exploded with modern recording technology, and yet many data sets suffer from significant incompleteness. Read more →
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