"Kings" and Predictions
Event details
| Date | 05.02.2009 |
| Hour | 17:15 |
| Speaker | Prof. Didier Sornette |
| Location |
GR C0 01
|
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Extreme fluctuations or events are often associated with power law statistics. Indeed, it is a popular belief that "wild randomness" (to use a term proposed by Mandelbrot) is deeply associated with distributions with power law tails characterized by small exponents. In other words, power law tails are often seen as the epitome of extreme events. Here, we document in several systems that there is life beyond power law tails: power laws can be superseded by "kings", monster events that occur beyond the power law tail. Kings reveal hidden mechanisms that are only transiently active and that amplify the normal power law fluctuations. We will present evidence of the king phenomenon on the statistics of financial losses, hydrodynamic turbulence, material rupture, earthquakes, epileptic seizures, and cyber risks. The special status of kings open a new research program on their predictability, based on the hypothesis that they belong to a different class of their own and express specific mechanisms amplifying the normal dynamics via positive feedbacks. We conclude with the potentials and state of the arts for the predictions of material rupture, earthquakes, financial crashes and epileptic seizures.
Practical information
- General public
- Free