A Mathematical Model for the Dynamics and Synchronization of Cows

The weird thing is that this appears to be quite serious (although it contains jokes, and quite right too), and motivated by a genuine need to understand the dynamics of coupled cow ensembles.

And there's an interesting and nonobvious result: you can increase the coupling between your cows and get their behaviour to synchronize less. (Although that's only true for a particular configuration of which cows interact with which others, and it's probably not realistic.) Their main example of this isn't quite as surprising as it sounds, to me at least: there's some lag in the influence of one cow on another, and the situation in which increased coupling reduces synchronization is one where there are long chains of mutually influencing cows.

I loved this sentence, from the second page: "Cattle are ruminants, so it is biologically plausible to view them as oscillators."

The paper actually has pictures in it showing spherical cows. The acknowledgements say: "We thank [...] Puck Rombach for assistance with cow puns, and Yulian Ng for drawing a spherical cow for us." Obviously it's a fair assumption that everyone reading their paper is familiar with the joke.

Standing up? Lying down? Apparently they're using some kind of nonspherical cow approximation.

I was trying to figure out if this model is Turing-complete but couldn't rapidly prove it either way. Still, with chaotic dynamics in the model I think the odds are pretty decent that something could be found, although it would of course require absurd levels of precision by the cows even if the model was simple, and could require truly absurd levels if it does end up requiring the chaos.

Steven Strogatz has studied (and to a large extent popularized) mathematical models of synchronization of fireflies (and many other things). Here's an interesting TED talk by him about synchronization in general:

http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_strogatz_on_sync.html

Consider a spherical cow...