What Happens in San Juan Capistrano Stays in San Juan Capistrano (2024 Edition)

I am in San Juan Capistrano gaming and hanging out with friends for the long weekend.

2024 Most Valuable Player (MVP) Awards

Major League Baseball has announced the winners of the 2024 Most Valuable Player (MVP) awards. See this page for the complete distribution of votes.

Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees was the unanimous MVP in the American League, with Bobby Witt Jr. of the Kansas City Royal receiving all 2nd-place voters. (I believe that the latter has never happened before.) The American League also had several other very strong candidates in an exceptional field. In the National League, Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers was the unanimous MVP. This was his third unanimous MVP. Nobody else in Major League Baseball history has won multiple MVP awards unanimously.

2024 Cy Young Awards

Baseball's 2024 Cy Young awards were announced today. Chris Sale of the Atlanta Braves won in the National League, and Tarik Skubal was a unanimous winner in the American League.

2024 Baseball Managers of the Year

The 2024 Managers of the Year in Major League Baseball are Stephen Vogt of the Cleveland Guardians and Pat Murphy of the Milwaukee Brewers.

2024 Baseball Rookies of the Year

The 2024 Rookies of the Year were announced today. Paul Skenes of the Pirates was the winner of an exceptionally strong rookie class (beating out the two Jacksons) in the National League, and Luis Gil of the Yankees was the winner (barely winning over Colton Cowser of the Orioles) of a much weaker rookie class in the American League.

Various Major League Baseball Awards

Various Major League Baseball awards were announced today. These awards include the Comeback Players of the Year — which were Garrett Crochet in the American League and Chris Sale in he National League — and several others.

The more significant awards — Most Valuable Player, Cy Young award, Rookie of the Year, and Manager of the Year — will be announced next week. The three finalists for each award in each league were announced recently.

2024 Silver Slugger Awards

Major League Baseball has announced its 2024 Silver Slugger Awards. You'll noticed a few Dodgers among the awardees. :)

"Oscillatory Networks: Insights from Piecewise-Linear Modeling"

Another of my papers just appeared in final form. Here are some details.

Title: Oscillatory Networks: Insights from Piecewise-Linear Modeling

Authors: Stephen Coombes, Mustafa Şayli, Rüdiger Thul, Rachel Nicks, Mason A. Porter, and Yi Ming Lai

Dedication: We dedicate this paper to the memory of our dear friend and colleague Yi Ming Lai. Although he began with us on the journey to write this paper, which in part reviews some of his research activity in recent years, sadly he did not end that journey with us. RIP Yi Ming Lai 1988–2022.

Abstract: There is enormous interest—both mathematically and in diverse applications—in understanding the dynamics of coupled-oscillator networks. The real-world motivation of such networks arises from studies of the brain, the heart, ecology, and more. It is common to describe the rich emergent behavior in these systems in terms of complex patterns of network activity that reflect both the connectivity and the nonlinear dynamics of the network components. Such behavior is often organized around phase-locked periodic states and their instabilities. However, the explicit calculation of periodic orbits in nonlinear systems (even in low dimensions) is notoriously hard, so network-level insights often require the numerical construction of some underlying periodic component. In this paper, we review powerful techniques for studying coupled-oscillator networks. We discuss phase reductions, phase–amplitude reductions, and the master stability function for smooth dynamical systems. We then focus, in particular, on the augmentation of these methods to analyze piecewise-linear systems, for which one can readily construct periodic orbits. This yields useful insights into network behavior, but the cost is that one needs to study nonsmooth dynamical systems. The study of nonsmooth systems is well developed when focusing on the interacting units (i.e., at the node level) of a system, and we give a detailed presentation of how to use saltation operators, which can treat the propagation of perturbations through switching manifolds, to understand dynamics and bifurcations at the network level. We illustrate this merger of tools and techniques from network science and nonsmooth dynamical systems with applications to neural systems, cardiac systems, networks of electromechanical oscillators, and cooperation in cattle herds.

2024 Gold-Glove Winners

Major League Baseball has announced its 2024 Gold-Glove winners.

What Happens in Seoul Stays in Seoul (2024 Edition)

I am off to Seoul to speak in a workshop on Theoretical Challenges in Network Science! I really enjoy visiting Seoul, and I am very happy to have another chance to visit.