The current financial crisis has been in part precipitated by the growth of complex credit derivatives and their mispricing. This talk will discuss some of the background to the `credit crunch', as well as the models and methods used currently. We will then develop an alternative view of large basket credit derivatives, as functions of a stochastic partial differential equation, which addresses some of the shortcomings.

Manifolds are important entities in dynamical systems, and organise space into regions in which different motions occur. For example, intersections between stable and unstable manifolds in discrete systems result in chaotic motion. This talk will focus on manifolds and their locations in continuous dynamical systems, and in particular on Melnikov's method and its adaptations for determining the effect of perturbations on manifolds. The relevance of such adaptations to a surprising range of applications will be shown, in addition to recent theoretical developments inspired by such problems. The applications addressed in this talk include understanding the motion of fluid near oceanic eddies and currents, optimising mixing in nano-fluidic devices in order to improve reactions, computing the speed of a flame front, and finding the spreading rate of bacterial colonies.

Any matrix in $SL_n (\mathbb C)$ can be written as a product of elementary matrices using the Gauss elimination process. If instead of the field of complex numbers, the entries in the matrix are elements of a more general ring, this becomes a delicate question. In particular, rings of complex-valued functions on a space are interesting cases. A deep result of Suslin gives an affirmative answer for the polynomial ring in $m$ variables in case the size $n$ of the matrix is at least 3. In the topological category, the problem was solved by Thurston and Vaserstein. For holomorphic functions on $\mathbb C^m$, the problem was posed by Gromov in the 1980s. We report on a complete solution to Gromov's problem. A main tool is the Oka-Grauert-Gromov h-principle in complex analysis. Our main theorem can be formulated as follows: In the absence of obvious topological obstructions, the Gauss elimination process can be performed in a way that depends holomorphically on the matrix. This is joint work with Bj\"orn Ivarsson.

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