Book Review: Complexity

Saturday June 8, 2002

I bought this book called Complexity: the Emerging Science At the Edge of Order and Chaos by M. Mitchell Waldrop off the shelf of a book store without having heard about it before. It turned out to be a very good read. The field of complexity studies how individual entities like a cell or a stock or a human being join other such entities and with each entity functioning independently, still manage to evolve as a coherent whole system (like a biological being, national/international level economy, societies and civilizations respectively). Despite the second law of thermodynamics, how do these systems evolve into a more coherent order is indeed an intriguing question. This book discusses the research efforts that are ongoing in this field and the formation of The Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico to study such phenomenons. Naturally understanding the emergence of complex systems from smaller independent entities will have wide implications anywhere from population control, stock markets to formation of stars and galaxies, etc. The way the book is written, neatly mixing the details about the formation of the institute, research efforts that are ongoing, all the interesting characters that are involved in the process, the prose itself, etc. makes it delightful. Each chapter starting from a new point (instead of continuing the discussion from where the previous chapter ended) delineating a different thread relevant to the discussion and eventually all the threads crossing each other's path via the institute, was also quite nice.

Wide ranges of organizations like Citibank, NSF, DoE, etc. are funding the institute. Citibank for example, is interested in understanding the economies of different smaller countries. Apparently a whole lot of their investments based on old, traditional models of economic theory (that denounces "Increasing returns" type ideas and insists that supply will always be equal to demand) went bust and so they are trying to see if this complexity model can give them a better, more realistic projection. This idea of forming an institute that will work across fields in itself is quite interesting. Invariably research efforts funded by govt. funding agencies and university departments are quite narrowly focused in one small area. In order to go the other way, this institute has a philosophy of securing funds for the whole institute and then getting interesting people from various fields to come and work together in the institute on problems that span multiple subject areas obviating the need for the researchers to write grant proposals and secure their own research money. This method of operation, though harder to implement and monitor, ensures that researchers don't get stuck in a narrow area stipulated by the funding agency.

Next picked up "Fresh Blood: The new American Immigrant by Sanford J. Ungar. Heard a brief interview of the author couple of years back on Good Morning America or some such program. Since then thought I should read this book and kept it on the list. Finally bought a copy. Seems to be an interesting write-up about contributions new immigrants make. It is based on individual anecdotes, interviews as well as statistics. Will see how it turns out.. :-)