Adilson E. Motter
American scientist

Adilson E. Motter (born January 1, 1974, in Brazil) is the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Physics at Northwestern University, where he has helped develop the concept of synthetic rescue in network biology as well as methods to control the nonlinear dynamics of complex networks. In joint work with Takashi Nishikawa, he discovered the phenomenon of converse symmetry breaking (also referred to as asymmetry-induced symmetry). Motter's research is focused on complex systems and nonlinear phenomena, primarily involving complex networks, systems biology, chaos and statistical physics.
Scientific activity
Motter has contributed to the study of nonlinear phenomena in complex systems. He and his collaborators have established conditions for the synchronization of power grids and other complex networks. Together with his former student Z. Nicolaou, he designed a class of mechanical metamaterials that exhibit longitudinal negative compressibility. He has devised local methods for cascade control in distributed systems and his team advanced the large-scale modeling of cascading failures. His group has studied implications of these methods for the recovery of lost function in biological and ecological networks and for the control of complex networks in general. His first publication in network science established the three degrees of separation for English words.
In other areas, most noticeably chaos theory, he is known for accommodating the formalism of chaos theory within general relativity.
“Adilson E. Motter” enters the record as american scientist. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Adilson, Motter and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4682835. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1974.
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This entry incorporates text from “Adilson E. Motter” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.