About 100 flying particles

Daniel Strömbom and myself are organizing a symposium at the coming European Conference on Mathematical and Theoretical Biology. The title is the collective motion of about 100 particles.

The symposium is about collective motion of animals and cells. Models in which we describe how individuals form groups, move together and form spectaculr patterns. The title captures what we think is a central mathematical problem with these models. Mathematicians are good at solving problems that involve two or three interacting objects and it is good at solving problems that involve an infinite number of objects, where everything blurs in to a continuum. It is not very good at dealing with 100s and 1000s of interacting objects. It is exactly these numbers which are typical for interesting animal flocks, like starlings and human crowds.

We have four invited speakers James Anderson, Raluca Eftimie, Pawel Romanczuk and Kit Yates, all of who have very different approaches to the problem. We hope to create a lively discussion and debate afterwards and start to think about how to tackle this problem. We are now looking for a few more contributed talks. Please send an abstract to Daniel if you are interested.