Fundamentals of Complex Systems Science: Collectives

Catalog description

From neurons in a brain to fish in a school to people in an economy, collectives are all around us. These are complex systems in which we understand in some detail how the individual components behave and interact, but the behavior we are interested in is at the larger scale of the aggregate. The behavior of systems like these is challenging to predict and understand largely due to the sheer number of interacting components, as well as the unintuitive way that contributions from individuals scale up to have large collective effects. Complex systems science has developed an array of conceptual tools to help understand collective behavior. Explores these foundational concepts, including emergence, scaling laws, dynamical modes and coarse-graining. Uses these tools to de-mystify powerful aggregate-scale effects, from impressive feats of swarm intelligence to potentially harmful instabilities and hysteresis.