The paper” The Smallest Possible Interaction Radius for Flock Synchronization” co-authored by CHEN Ge, Associate Researcher LIU Zhixin and Prof. GUO Lei was elected as the SIGEST paper by SIAM Review for its contributions and topic, its clear writing style, and its accessibility for the SIAM community.

How local interactions among agents lead to global behavior of the whole group is a key problem in the complex system study. This problem widely exists in natural, social and economic systems, and attracts great interest of researchers from various fields. Under a local average rule, the paper showed that to guarantee the consensus of flocks, the smallest possible interaction radius approximately equals √log n/nn, with n being the population size, which coincides with the critical radius for connectivity of static random geometric graphs.

The SIAM Review consists of five sections, all containing articles of broad interest. SIGEST highlights a recent paper from one of SIAM's specialized research journals, chosen on the basis of exceptional interest to the entire SIAM community and revised and condensed as needed for greater accessibility. The SIGEST paper Award Certificate will be awarded in 2015.