Mark Mineev-Weinstein: Mathematics of Integrable Growth

A wide class of nonlinear physical processes, reducible to a free-boundary dynamics, possess an extraordinary powerful mathematical structure, which turned out to be completely integrable and, as such, can produce a rich set of experimentally realizable exact solutions.

Remarkably, the same mathematical structure was established to be equivalent to the 2-D quantum gravity, to the inverse potential problem (which stems from I. Newton), and is shown to be tightly connected with the theory of random matrices and classical integrable hierarchies.
 
The talk is going to be informal, and a very minimal technical (mostly analytical) background is expected from the audience.