Self-organized behaviors are commonly observed in nature and human societies, such as bird flocks, fish swarms and human crowds. In this talk, I will present some celebrated mathematical models, with simple small-scale interactions which lead to the emergence of global behaviors: aggregation and flocking.

I will discuss the models in different scales: from microscopic agent-based dynamics, through kinetic mean-field descriptions, to macroscopic fluid systems. In particular, the macroscopic models can be viewed as compressible Euler equations with nonlocal interactions. I will show some recent results on the global wellposedness theory of the systems, large time behaviors, and interesting connections to some classical equations in fluid mechanics.