The February meeting of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society is being hosted by the University of Strathclyde and held today (Friday 19 February). The principal speaker is Anne Skeldon and her talk title is “Mathematical modelling of the sleep-wake cycle: light, clocks and societal rhythms“. A link to the programme is here and the talk abstract is given below.

Abstract: We’re all familiar with sleep, but how can we mathematically model it? And what determines how long and when we sleep? In this talk I’ll introduce the non-smooth coupled oscillator systems that form the basis of current models of sleep-wake regulation and discuss their dynamical behavior. I will describe how we have used models to inform debates on societal questions such as whether to move school start time for adolescents and whether or not countries should move to permanent daylight saving time.