Michael Ostroff

Class of 2024

Michael Ostroff is a physicist who is primarily interested in general relativity and electrodynamics. He's currently working toward finding non-null electrovacuum solutions to Einstein's equations that have no singularities and have charge sources. In particular, he's looking for topological soliton solutions. Michael typically uses Mathematica in his research, due to its power in performing symbolic manipulation and flexibility in computing.

Michael is also very interested in chaotic, nonlinear systems. He is currently doing research at FAU's MPCR Lab regarding pseudorandom key generation using digital chaotic systems. While studying chaotic systems, Michael discovered a phenomenon he refers to as fractal flow. Fractal flow is how the components of a fractal move around as their parameters change. For a fractal defined on the complex plane, such as the Julia set, the output is a complex number. For a general fractal, though, the fractal flow is of the same type as its domain.