Consider a network of identical phase oscillators with sinusoidal coupling. How likely are the oscillators to globally synchronize, starting from random initial phases? One expects that dense networks have a strong tendency to synchronize and the basin of attraction for the synchronous state to be the whole phase space. But, how dense is dense enough? In this (hopefully) entertaining Zoom talk, we use techniques from numerical linear algebra and computational Algebraic geometry to derive the densest known networks that do not synchronize and the sparsest networks that do. This is joint work with Steven Strogatz and Mike Stillman.
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