Dense crowds of pedestrians shift into surprisingly orderly lines. Math explains why [ Published articles ]
No matter how chaotic the train station at rush hour might seem, there’s likely more order than you think in that crowd.
It’s long been observed that in a dense crowd with people headed in opposite directions, multiple parallel lanes emerge. In a recent report in the March 3 Science , mathematicians Tim Rogers and Karol Bacik of the University of Bath in England used a mathematical model to describe how such lanes form and evolve and confirmed the predictions with live experiments.