Art Winfree's first scientific paper, published in 1967 and based on research he did as a senior in college, was about synchronization of biological oscillators. In his honor, this talk will survey what we know (and don't know) about synchronization, 40 years later.

The tendency to synchronize is one of the most mysterious and pervasive drives in all of nature. Every night along the tidal rivers of Malaysia, thousands of fireflies flash in silent, hypnotic unison; the moon spins in perfect resonance with its orbit around the Earth; the intense coherence of a laser comes from trillions of atoms pulsing together. All these astonishing feats of synchrony occur spontaneously --- almost as if the universe had an overwhelming desire for order.

On the surface, these phenomena might seem unrelated. After all, the forces that synchronize fireflies have nothing to do with those in a laser. But at a deeper level, they are all connected by the same mathematical theme: self-organization, the spontaneous emergence of order out of chaos. Video footage of synchronous fireflies and the notorious crowd synchrony that triggered the wobbling of London's Millennium Bridge will be shown.