SIAM Conference on Dynamical Systems 2023

Our Notes from SIAM Dynamical Systems 2023

Our team was at the SIAM Conference on Dynamical Systems in Portland, and we wanted to share some of the research that really stood out to us. It was a great chance to see the kinds of complex problems people are tackling right now.

Here are a few highlights that got us thinking:

Alethea Barbaro’s work on collective motion was fascinating. She’s modeling how groups (like flocks or swarms) move when individuals have different sensing abilities. This is a huge challenge in multi-agent simulations. It immediately made us think about how you could use a tool like CoCalc to run a dozen parallel simulations, tweaking the sensing parameters in each to see how the group behavior changes without getting your local machine tangled up.

Sunghwan "Sunny" Jung's presentation on animals and fluid instabilities was another great example of messy, real-world science. He explored how animals navigate and even use things like turbulence. Research like this is so interdisciplinary. You might need to run a fluid dynamics simulation, analyze observational data with Python, and build a mathematical model in a LaTeX paper, all for one project. It’s a perfect case for having all those different tools and files in one shared online space.

We also really enjoyed the talks that went back to fundamentals. Hugh Hunt’s discussion on the physics of pendulum clocks and Alexandria Volkening’s deep dive into stability analysis were great reminders of how powerful the core principles are. This is the kind of stuff you want to code up from scratch in a notebook to really get a feel for it—and it’s a perfect teaching example to share with a student who can then play with the code themselves.

Going to conferences like this is incredibly valuable for us. Seeing the actual computational hurdles you face is what helps us figure out how to make CoCalc a more useful and practical tool. A huge thank you to the SIAM organizers for putting on such a productive event.

All the best,

The CoCalc Team