Anja Slim, Monash University loves being at the frontier of maths and earth sciences, she will be lecturing at Summer School 2016. We spoke to her research and why she enjoys her work.
What kind of problems are you interested in broadly in the field? (maths as a whole) and what are your favourite applications of your work?
I’m a fluid dynamicist particularly interested in slow and sticky flows occurring in geological and industrial applications. At the moment I’m most interested in modelling relevant to storing carbon dioxide underground and modelling relevant to the formation of nickel-copper-platinum group element ore deposits.
One of the biggest challenges in geological fluid dynamics is how to capture all relevant processes on scales from microns to kilometres in a tractable, yet rigorous model.
What do you most like about your work?
I love being at the frontier between maths and earth sciences; bringing the rigour of maths to help understand the earth. The Navier-Stokes equations allow us to model (almost) any geological flow, with the boundary conditions responsible for the huge variety in phenomena. The Navier-Stokes equations themselves are rarely tractable except numerically, but features of the flow such as slenderness can often be exploited to rigorously reduce the governing equations to the essentials. Here more can be said mathematically and deep insight can be gained.
