Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Self-organization is a common feature in the collective behavior of many animal species, such as flocking birds, herding mammals, and swarming bacteria. As the number of individuals gets large, instead of tracking the movement of each individual, it is more efficient to model the evolution of the whole population density using partial differential equations (PDEs). In this talk, I will introduce some PDE models for collective dynamics, and discuss the challenges in both the modeling part and the mathematical analysis.