Applied Mathematics Commons^™

Consensus And Clustering In Opinion Formation On Networks, Julia Bujalski, Grace Dwyer, Todd Kapitula, Quang Nhat Le

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

Ideas that challenge the status quo either evaporate or dominate. The study of opinion dynamics in the socio-physics literature treats space as uniform and considers individuals in an isolated community, using ordinary differential equation (ODE) models. We extend these ODE models to include multiple communities and their interactions. These extended ODE models can be thought of as being ODEs on directed graphs. We study in detail these models to determine conditions under which there will be consensus and pluralism within the system. Most of the consensus/pluralism analysis is done for the case of one and two cities. However, we numerically …