Category: Talks

Too Lazy to Read the Paper. Episode 1

This inaugural episode features physicist, urban planning, human mobility and transportation scientist Marta C. González from UC Berkeley explaining the long and winding road to her paper The TimeGeo modeling framework for urban mobility without travel surveys [1].

In the podcast, we take our time, tracing Marta’s career from Venezuelan graduate student, to postdoc in Germany, Notre Dame (US), and Boston. We hear a bit about what it’s like to be a physicist at MIT’s transportation department … and how all those things shaped Marta’s research and the paper we’re discussing.

View/listen the full episode at: sunelehmann.com

Sharon Glotzer’s Deep Curiosity About Order From Chaos

Sharon Glotzer, a computational physicist and professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan, uses statistical mechanics to probe how the properties of materials emerge from the dynamics of their countless constituent particles. This week, she speaks with host Steven Strogatz about how a broken oil pump changed her life, how entropy is all about choices, and how she is driven to find the simple rules that explain the universe’s complexity.

Listen at: www.quantamagazine.org

Complexity and the Social World: building on the legacy of Allen, Byrne, Stacey and Cilliers

Complexity theory took off in the 1990s and four of the key people who shaped how these ideas were developed for application to the social world were represented in this event. In this unique retrospective, we explored how these four thinkers approached complexity thinking over long careers.

Invited Speakers

Peter Allen  – Embracing Complexity
David Byrne – Complexity and the Social Sciences
Chris Mowles in the legacy of Ralph Stacey –  Complex Responsive Processes
Rika Preiser in the legacy of Paul Cilliers –  Complexity and Postmodernism
The discussion was hosted by Jean Boulton and featured a guest appearence from Brian Arthur (who developed complexity economics)

The speakers were each interviewed and then discussed issues with each other, before answering questions from the audience.

Watch the video at: complexity-physics.org