Carsten Lunde Petersen, Professor

Carsten received his PhD from Aarhus University in 1993. He then worked at the Institut des Hautes Études Scinetifiques in Bures-sur-Yvette and subsequently at the Department of Mathematics at DTU before joining Roskilde University, first as assistant professor in 1996 and then as associate professor of mathematics in 1998.

Carsten has had - and participated in - several research council grants and is currently PI on a grant from the Independent Research Council of Denmark, "Xtreme Dynamics", on the asymptotic behaviour of the dynamics of polynomials in extremal families of polynomials.

Carsten has obtained fundamental and groundbreaking results in holomorphic dynamics given by iteration. That is, the field of dynamical systems, where the time evolution is given by repeated application of one or more complex differentiable functions. Carsten elaborates:

"Holomorphic dynamical systems are particularly attractive to study because on the one hand they possess many of the properties of more general dynamical systems, and on the other hand they can be described in great detail using the powerful tools from complex analysis and potential theory. The simplest interesting holomorphic dynamical systems are given by quadratic polynomials.

“The Mandelbrot set is a spectacular map of the possible dynamics of quadratic polynomials. Even now, more than 50 years after the first computer sketches of the Mandelbrot set, there are still white spots on the map. I have among other things, contributed to the understanding of the geometry of the Mandelbrot set and the chaotic locus, the so-called Julia set for quadratic polynomials with rotation domains".

In recent years, Carsten, and his research group, which includes prof. Henrik Laurberg Pedersen, has studied orthogonal sequences and other similar sequences of extremal polynomials from a dynamical point of view.

Carsten will be teaching dynamical systems in a couple of courses here at UCPH.

He can be reached at the office 04.4.06.