[Sci-all-l] Math Lecture on Wednesday

[John McCleary]

Just a reminder that we are hosting an extraordinary speaker tomorrow.
Steven Strogatz, professor of applied mathematics at Cornell University,
researches the notion of SYNCHRONY, the tendency of certain natural
periodic systems to synchronize their behavior. His abstract is appended
below. He is well known as an engaging and clear speaker (his book,
Sync, is wonderfully well written).


Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Rocky 300 4:30pm
Tea at 4:15 in Rocky 305

Steven Strogatz, Cornell University

"Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order"

What caused hundreds of Japanese children to fall into seizures while  
watching an episode of the cartoon show Pokemon?  Why do women  
roommates sometimes find that their menstrual periods occur in sync?

The tendency to synchronize is one of the most mysterious and  
pervasive drives in all of nature. Every night along the tidal rivers  
of Malaysia, thousands of fireflies flash in silent, hypnotic unison;  
the moon spins in perfect resonance with its orbit around the Earth;  
the intense coherence of a laser comes from trillions of atoms  
pulsing together. All these astonishing feats of synchrony occur  
spontaneously -- almost as if the universe had an overwhelming desire  
for order. On the surface, these phenomena might seem unrelated.   
After all, the forces that synchronize fireflies have nothing to do  
with those in a laser.
But at a deeper level, they are all connected by the same  
mathematical theme: self-organization, the spontaneous emergence of  
order out of chaos.
Video footage of synchronous fireflies, and the notorious crowd  
synchrony that triggered the wobbling of London's Millennium Bridge,  
will be shown.