Over the train station in the Italian capital Rome, Giorgio Parisi saw how tens of thousands of birds flew in beautiful billowing flocks.

He was captivated by the strangeness of the fact that the birds managed to create these cohesive formations and could fly so close to each other without colliding.

- Parisi sent out a group of physicists who were allowed to look at the flocks of birds and photograph their movements, says David Sumpter, professor of applied mathematics at Uppsala University.

With the help of their observations, the male managed to calculate that each bird only needs to keep track of and follow the next six or seven others in the flock.

- Based on this, he mathematically calculated how the pattern in the flock arises and how hundreds of thousands of birds can look as if they form a single body.

It is a calculation model that can also be transferred to completely different complex systems and materials, says Professor David Sumpter about the Nobel Laureate Giorgio Paris' research.

See what we humans can benefit from understanding birds flying in flocks in the video above.