Departmental Colloquium
Professor Joel E. Cohen
Rockefeller University & Columbia University
All Roads Lead to Rome, and Many Models Lead to Taylor's Power Law of Fluctuation Scaling
Abstract: "Taylor's law" asserts that, in sets of samples of a nonnegative quantity
(e.g., insect population abundance), the sample variance is approximately
proportional to some power of the sample mean. Taylor's law has been verified
for hundreds of species and in many fields beyond ecology, including physics
and finance. As scientific motivation, I will show some empirical examples of
Taylor's law from my own work. The main focus of my talk is the different
mathematical interpretations of Taylor's law and the great diversity of
theoretical models (from stochastic processes, differential equations,
and number theory, among other areas of mathematics) that lead to Taylor's law.
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