Additionally, Professor Curry's research is concerned with mathematical questions which are of interest to Atmospheric and Oceanic Scientists. A dynamical system is a mathematical model of the time evolution of a physical system. Professor Easton is interested in the study of dynamical systems of all kinds typically expressed as a differential or difference equation. The mathematical methods involved are geometric and topological. Professor Easton has worked on the three body problem of celestial mechanics, looked for chaos in area preserving maps of the plane and investigated transport in phase space.
Computer simulations are a useful tool and allow the results to be displayed graphically.
In the industrial application area, a central theme in his work concerns the modeling and visualization of scattered data sets in many variables. Frequently physical problems can be modeled in terms of partial differential equations. Elliptic partial differential equations are a subarea in which there is a well developed theory, linear and nonlinear, which allows us to understand the qualitative structure of the associated solutions. These results give satisfactory answers to many of the original physical problems. Professor Li's interests are to use and to further develop the theory of elliptic partial differential equations in order to understand the solutions to a more varied and rich set of problems.