A celebrated and controversial hypothesis suggests that some biological systems—parts,
aspects, or groups of them—may extract important functional benefits from operating at the …

Active matter physics is about systems in which energy is dissipated at some local level to
produce work. This is a generic situation, particularly in the living world but not only. What is …

Animals in groups touch each other, move in paths that cross, and interact in complex ways.
Current video tracking methods sometimes switch identities of unmarked individuals during …

Social organisation in animals takes many forms. It includes assemblages of territorial
animals, dominance hierarchies and social groups, among other things. The basic tenet that …

Collective decision-making in biological systems requires all individuals in the group to go
through a behavioural change of state. During this transition fast and robust transfer of …

One characteristic feature of soft matter systems is their strong response to external stimuli.
As a consequence they are comparatively easily driven out of their ground state and out of …

Coherent vortical motion has been reported in a wide variety of populations including living
organisms (bacteria, fishes, human crowds) and synthetic active matter (shaken grains …

In this chapter we have presented mathematical modeling approaches to biological pattern
formation. While reaction-diffusion models are appropriate to describe the spatio-temporal …

Flocking is a paradigmatic case of self-organized collective behavior in biology and a living
example of active matter. Several models and theories have been developed in recent years …

In these lecture notes, prepared for the Microswimmers Summer School 2015 at
Forschungszentrum Jülich, I discuss the well known Vicsek model for collective motion and …