Further information
Professor Geoffrey West, President of the Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico presents this Institute for Mathematical Sciences Complexity Science Seminar.
Abstract: Many of the most challenging, exciting and profound questions facing science and society lie at the boundaries between and across traditional disciplines. These include understanding the dynamics of innovation, growth, evolution and robustness of complex adaptive systems whether organisms, ecosystems, or societies; network dynamics in nature and society; biologically-inspired paradigms in computation; inter-relationship between information, energy, and dynamics in biology and society; growth, sustainability and the fate of cities and corporations; origins of cooperation; financial markets and risk; conflicts and patterns of political violence. The academic landscape needs places where fundamental problems, such as these, which require creative, trans-disciplinary collaborations are strongly encouraged and supported. Unfortunately, this has proven to be problematic within the traditional departmental structure of universities. Bringing together highly diverse minds prepared to engage in substantive, in-depth collaboration in the search for underlying principles, commonalities, simplicity and order in highly complex phenomena is a major challenge. To address some of our major problems requires a long-term commitment to high-risk, high-quality science in an environment where speculation is encouraged and a broader, more quantitative, vision for understanding emergent behaviour and multiscale phenomena in complex systems beyond the confines of the canonical disciplines is the norm. The Santa Fe Institute was founded by a small group of distinguished scientists, including three Nobel laureates, precisely to address these kinds of problems and to foster a complementary paradigm to the conventional modality of the disciplinary oriented structure of universities.
For more information contact Professor Henrik Jeldtoft Jensen, h.jensen@imperial.ac.uk.
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