Mathematical Biology Seminar John Dold University of Manchester Wednesday, March 22, 2006 "bushfires and some models of bushfires" The Bush is synonymous with Countryside in much of the Anglophone world, especially in the southern hemisphere. Australia can rightly claim the most fire-prone environment in the world and "bushfires" there are a major problem, as they can be anywhere when they get out of hand. They have been studied experimentally leading to some interesting questions about their propagation and behaviour under reasonably controllable conditions. In other cases, they can still defy all reasonable predictions. The seminar will describe some of the behaviour of bushfires and the ways in which they can be modelled. It will also touch on some of the more extreme phenomena that can arise, including sometimes disputed descriptions of survivors, and it will offer some conjectures about the underlying physics.