Sync
The tendency to synchronize may be the most mysterious and pervasive drive in all of nature. It has intrigued some of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century, including Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Norbert Wiener, Brian Josephson, and Arthur Winfree. At once elegant and riveting, Sync tells the story of the dawn of a new science. Steven Strogatz, a leading mathematician in the fields of chaos and complexity theory, explains how enormous systems can synchronize themselves, from the electrons in a superconductor to the pacemaker cells in our hearts. He shows that although these phenomena might seem unrelated on the surface, at a deeper level there is a connection, forged by the unifying power of mathematics.
Stats for nerds
14recommend
18mentions
15people
2010–2026years
94% recommend6% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Or if you want something lighter but still fascinating "Sync" by Steven Strogatz is also good :)
- Very cool work - refreshing to see a of different approach. I learned about Kuramoto oscillators many years ago from a book called Sync, by Steven Strogatz, which I highly recommend.
- A disclaimer is that I haven't read "Why We Sleep". Nonetheless I recommend the book "Sync" by Steven Strogatz (2003) -- particularly chapter 3 on sleep -- which describes a neat coupling of when we sleep / when we wake up to our body temperature which oscillates with a period of roughly 24 hours. (See figures on pgs 81 and 83.) Much of this discussion on sleep is derived from "isolation" research in the mid 1970's by Elliot Weitzman and Charles Czeisler, experiments in which subjects were isolated from all sense of time including daylight, clocks, and the news, to study their sleep cycles in the absence of external information telling them the time of day.
- https://www.amazon.com/Sync-Order-Emerges-Universe-Nature/dp... is also a good read on it. Perhaps not as technical as the above but has some interesting history on the discovery of these interesting mathematical truths.
- Sync by Steven Strogatz
- James Gleick's "Chaos" remains, in my view, a great popular book on the subject, and manages to convey many of the ideas at a conceptual level without getting technical. And if you enjoy that, you might also like Strogatz's "Sync."
For slightly more technical treatment, Strogatz's Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos is now a standard text. It isn't terribly technical and is quite well written and (in my view) easy to read for anyone with a background in vector calculus, diff eqs, & perhaps a little bit of linear algebra. (There are now other good options to, some more mathematical and some more application-oriented, but I still think Strogatz is a good place to start.)
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