Science is best when it is communicated to the general public, as it may inspire both the speaker and their audience. That is the idea behind "Įkvėpti mokslo" ("Inspired by Science"), the open lecture series run by the Energy and Technology Museum (ETM) in Vilnius together with the Vilnius City Council and Vilnius University. Science journalist and writer Goda Raibytė-Aleksa will moderate, helping the audience ask their questions.

The lectures start today (see, ETM website) and will take place on every Wednesday up to the 9th of December. Notably, among diverse group of researchers, there will be two members of our group:

• On the 11th of November Vygintas Gontis will tell about physics-inspired understanding of Lithuanian economic success.
• On the 18th of November Aleksejus Kononovicius will give a more general perspective on how physicists see social phenomena.

Both talks are free and open to everyone, and no specific background in physical sciences or social sciences is needed. Bring your curiosity and questions! See you!

Fourteen years ago, in a post on Lotka-Volterra equations, I have briefly mentioned Verhulst's population dynamics model. But since then, I still haven't written a dedicated post about this model. As in the near future I would like to explore its stochastic modification, let us explore the deterministic version in this post.

In a recent episode of Mokslo Sriuba, one of our group members, dr. Vidas Regelskis, shared his thoughts on how large language models can help push the boundaries of mathematics and mathematical physics.

The derivations of the hypergeometric and binomial distributions follow the same general strategy. In both cases, we first identify all elementary outcomes that are equally likely, then count how many of those outcomes correspond to the event of interest, namely obtaining exactly \( k \) successes. The main difference lies in what constitutes an elementary outcome.

Yesterday, I gave lecture "What makes human behavior interesting to physicists?" (lt. "Kuo fizikams įdomus žmonių elgesys?") to a large group of high school students participating in a project "Student for a day", organized by Vilnius University.

While I do not teaching anything directly related to my research, I have volunteered to do a special introductory lecture and try to explain why physicists are interested in social systems. Initially, I intended to tell students more-or-less about the same things I did when giving a talk at Nacionalinė moksleivių akademija. Yet instead of simply trimming the lecture, I have decided instead to focus on a single example and develop it a bit more. So, in the end I have talked about how "normal" (Gaussian) humans create cities that are rather "peculiar". This lead me to talk about Malthus and Verhulst models of population growth (dedicated blog post should be published soon) and then pivot to preferential attachment as seen in Simon model (I hope to prepare dedicated blog post early next year).

If you are interested, you can take a sneak peek at my slides here (though they are in Lithuanian).