Author Description

"Where do new fields or disciplines come from? How do we establish when a series of inventions and discoveries warrants an entirely new paradigm, or whether existing ones might be modified to accommodate novelty? In The Complex World, David Krakauer, President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute, establishes a clear definition of complex systems and tracks the emergence of complexity science-perhaps the first modern science to transcend disciplines-over the past two centuries. Complexity science seeks to understand an adaptive ontology though a synthesis of diverse approaches and perspectives in research. More than mere methodology, such work provides a shared language of principles spanning biology, economic life, computational systems, and cultural processes more generally, rooting abstract ideas in physical reality and finding physical reality in information. The Complex World was previously available only in volume 1 of Foundational Papers in Complexity Science"--