Mathematicians can be fascinated by the elegance and beauty of the ideas behind mathematical theories. Mathematical structures are already out there and our goal is to discover them.
Every January, the best chess players in the world compete in the TATA Steel Chess Championship, organized in Wijk aan Zee (The Netherlands). Among this year’s fourteen participants were Magnus Carlsen, world no. 1, coming into the tournament with an unbeaten streak of 104 matches, and Fabiano Caruana, the world no. 2.
Most of you will agree with my girlfriend that when the number of drugs dumping increases for three years in a row, this points to an increase in the demand for drugs, the number of illegal producers, the amount of drugs produced etc. Doing some math you will see this may not be the case.
As many phenomena in the classical world have quantum counter part, it raises the question if this is also true for synchronization. As synchronization is a collective phenomenon, it may help gaining a better understanding of how collective phenomena in the classical and quantum world are connected.
Have you ever wondered what mathematicians mean when they talk about mathematical models of real-life phenomena? And what can such a model tell us about the network-phenomenon we are studying?