Opening Colloquium

Location: Technische Universität Berlin
Lecture Hall EW 201
Hardenbergstr. 36, 10623 Berlin

A selection of photos can be viewed here.

Large networks of many coupled oscillators have been used as models for phenomena in diverse systems. Examples include flashing fire flies, control of animals' circadian rhythm by the suprachiasmatic nucleus, neuronal dynamics, synchronization of cardiac pace-maker cells, animals that rest with half their brain in the sleep state, chemical oscillations, oscillations in bubbly fluids, synchronization of pedestrians walking on foot bridges, clapping audiences, Josephson junction circuits, arrays of coupled lasers, and many others. This talk will demonstrate and illustrate a recently developed, very general technique that reduces the study of the long time temporal behavior of these models to that of low dimensional dynamical systems (e.g., to a small number of ODEs). In particular, it is shown that all the possible long-time behaviors and their bifurcations are captured by this technique. Discussion of the basic mechanism responsible for this reduction and of extensions (e.g., spatio-temporal patterning models) will also be presented.