How and why does synchrony emerge? | Daniel Abrams

Recorded on 05/15/2026 Watch the recording without ads at https://www.nitmb.org/evolutionary-ga... Title: How and why does synchrony emerge? Speaker: Daniel Abrams This talk was recorded as part of the 'Evolutionary Games: Mathematical Theory and Biological Insights' workshop Workshop Overview: Evolutionary game theory (EGT) offers a powerful modeling framework for analyzing frequency-dependent interactions in biological, social, and artificial systems. Originally adapted from economic models and applied to animal behavior, EGT has become a foundational tool for studying phenomena ranging from microbial competition and tumor progression to cultural dynamics and cooperative AI. The field's mathematical foundations have expanded over the years, incorporating tools from dynamical systems, probability theory, partial differential equations, and network science. This diverse modeling toolkit has enabled researchers to examine how social behaviors evolve in structured populations, how empirical data can inform game parameters, and how environmental feedbacks shape evolutionary dynamics. This workshop will bring together an interdisciplinary community of EGT researchers to chart new directions for theory and applications. Through presentations and discussions, participants will identify mismatches between current models and observed systems, explore strategies for integrating empirical data into theoretical work, and formulate open problems that resonate across applied mathematics, biology, physics, and computer science. A primary aim of the workshop is to stimulate interdisciplinary collaboration and expand the methodological scope of EGT to frequency-dependent problems across scales. NITMB Overview: The NSF-Simons National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology (NITMB) aims to integrate the disciplines of mathematics and biology in order to transform the practice of biological research and to inspire new mathematical discoveries. NITMB is a partnership between Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. It is funded by the National Science Foundation DMS-2235451 and the Simons Foundations MP-TMPS-00005320. The mission of the NITMB is to create a nationwide collaborative research community that will generate new mathematical results and uncover the “rules of life” through theories, data-informed mathematical models, and computational and statistical tools.