Transient Self-Organization: Closed Systems vs. Open Systems of Reaction and Diffusion
Since Alan Turing stated the notion of diffusion-induced instability in 1952, it is well known that reaction-diffusion “open” systems generate various types of spatio-temporal patterns and in fact, some systems have been used as models of biological pattern formation. In response to this flow, reaction-diffusion “open” systems have been investigated in mathematical communities and became one of the main studies of nonlinear PDEs. As compared to these systems, “closed” systems have been gradually less interesting and have gone from the study of reaction-diffusion systems. However, recently, new pattern formation can be observed even in closed systems as the consequence of transient self-organization, I would like to focus on such “closed systems” in this lecture and emphasize that theoretical understanding of such pattern formation is a very important subject in nonlinear mathematics with application to biology.
