Mathematics Colloquium: "The Modeling of Refugee Movement"

2015-09-03

4:10pm Neill 5W

Lynn Schreyer - University of Colorado

Here I will provide a brief overview of some of the real-world based problems that I have worked on and the mathematical approaches used. Then we will examine one problem (work-in-progress) in detail – that of modeling the movement of refugees using a deterministic partial differential equation (PDE). The evacuation of any group of persons from their homes requires a significant increase in danger, either natural or man caused. But once persons start evacuating, the number of refugees can increase significantly. They generally migrate toward regions considered relatively safe, and may or may not travel along a road. For this model we model the refugees as a population density, taking into account the “safety gradient”, the “trafficability”, and the preferred refugee density, which is culturally dependent. The resulting PDE problem is ill-posed and numerically challenging to approximate, and we will discuss progress made.

Please join us for refreshments at 3:30pm in Neill 216, the Hacker Lounge.