Bob Planqué |
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Dr. Robert Planqué Room S-248 Department of Mathematics Faculty of Sciences Vrije Universiteit De Boelelaan 1081a 1081 HV Amsterdam The Netherlands
rplanque@few.vu.nl |
Teaching
handleiding Differentiëren en Integreren 2See my teaching page for a complete listing of all the courses I teach or have taught.
Research
I'm an Assistant Professor at the Mathematics Dept, Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Until July 2006, I was a mathematical biology postdoc at the Bristol Ant Lab, working on self-organizing processes in ant colonies, together with my colleagues Nigel Franks, James Marshall, Tim Kovacs, FX Dechaume-Moncharmont and Anna Dornhaus. My research is mainly in the application of simple ODE models to unravel the mechanisms underlying the organization of social animals, both at an individual and at a group level.
As a PhD student at the CWI in Amsterdam, between 2000 and 2004, I worked on two projects:
- twisted rods, energy minimization methods (both with Mark A. Peletier and Gert van der Heijden). We try to get a better understanding of the buckling behaviour of rods, ultimately to get a better grip on the Supercoiling of DNA structures.
- population biology and evolutionary ecology (with Nick Britton, Nigel Franks and, again, Mark). Here we investigate the question why certain types of defense behaviour of host birds that are parasitised by cuckoos are common, whereas other strategies seem to be absent.
Publications
Xeno-canto
Together with Willem-Pier Vellinga and Sander Pieterse, I run xeno-canto, the world's largest community database of bird song. It currently features over 32,000 recordings of more than 5,600 species of birds, the bulk of which coming from South and Central America.
The concept of xeno-canto is to devise new ways to negotiate bird song, new search methods by which a name can be given to a recording, thereby making it easier to work with bird song as a research tool such as for biodiversity assessments. Such new tools include searching on qualitative descriptions, community search, integration of Google Maps to appreciate geographical variation, sonogram checklists, and more.
If you have made some recordings of birds from the Americas, Africa or Asia, you might want to consider sharing these on xeno-canto. Registration is free!
Paraphernalia
Zit je in 3/4 VWO, woon je in de buurt van Amsterdam en vind je wiskunde leuk, maar op school niet zo spannend? Geef je dan op voor de Wiskundekring! De Wiskundekring wordt georganiseerd door de VU in samenwerking met Vierkant voor Wiskunde, en wel door Wim Berkelmans, Guit-Jan Ridderbos, Matthijs Joosten en ondergetekende. Elke twee weken op vrijdagmiddag behandelen we leuke stukken wiskunde die op de middelbare school niet belicht worden, in een groep van zo'n 20 leerlingen. Compleet met laddercompetitie en gastcolleges van VU docenten.
Genealogy of the Planqué family (in Dutch).
Doe mee met
!
(Dutch/Belgian influenza monitoring project) Sinds 2003 wordt door een leger van ruim 20.000 mensen in Nederland,
België, en sinds 2005 jaar Portugal, de jaarlijkse griepgolf op de voet gevolgd.
I'm an avid participant in so-called Studygroups Mathematics and Industry, and worked on various problems in Leiden 1998, Amsterdam, 2002 (as co-organiser), Leiden, 2003, Delft, 2004, and Twente, 2008.
Together with the popular science magazine Natuur & Techniek this same bunch of people organised the Eurodiffusion Project, in which we monitor the spreading of euro coins from different countries over Europe from a Lowlands' perspective. Become a Eurometer and participate!