Edward Ott: Collective Behavior of Large Networks of Simple Dynamical Units

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The Department of Applied Mathematics is pleased to host this series of colloquium lectures, funded in part by a generous gift from the Boeing Company. This series will bring to campus prominent applied mathematicians from around the world.


Speaker: Edward Ott, University of Maryland – College Park

Date: January 12, 2017, 4pm, reception to follow

Location: (DEM 104)

Title: Collective Behavior of Large Networks of Simple Dynamical Units

Abstract: Large systems of many coupled dynamical units are of crucial interest in a host of physical, biological and technological settings. Often the dynamical units that are coupled exhibit oscillatory behavior. The understanding and analysis of these large, complex systems offers many challenges. In this talk I will introduce this topic, give some examples, and describe a technique for analyzing a large class of problems of this type. The results I will discuss will reduce the complicated, high dimensional, microscopic dynamics of the full system to that or a low dimensional system governing the macroscopic evolution of certain ‘order parameters’. This reduction is exact in the limit of large systems, i.e., N going to infinity, where N is the number of coupled units, and can be employed to discover and study all the macroscopic attractors and bifurcations of the system. [Refs.: E.Ott and T.M.Antonsen, Chaos (2008, 2009).]

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