Career
Motter"s research is focused on complex systems and nonlinear phenomena, primarily involving complex networks, systems biology, chaos and statistical physics. 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 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.
In other areas he is known for accommodating the formalism of chaos theory within general relativity and, along with his collaborators, for establishing the three degrees of separation for English words.
