steve strogatz

He's interested in the dynamics of non-linear systems..  most famously a paper on cricket choruses that gave the mathematical foundation for the small world problem .. six degrees of separation for example.  Here's a fun public talk on synchronization 

 

Around the same time he gave a talk on the dynamics of a long friendship he had shared with his high school math teacher.  He posted a bit of it online and has written a book on it.

Comments

[greg b]

Despite entropy, atoms sync, ecosystems sync, pendulums, etc. Nature must be minimizing some metric, which means there is a hidden symmetry by Noether’s Theorem