Research Seminar in Mathematics - From elections to science of cities: an introduction to complexity

Speaker

Attila Szilva, Uppsala University.

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Meeting ID: 664 8962 2515
Passcode: 877571

Abstract

Animals from rats to the blues whales are built up from cells arranged in networks. The topology of the underlying networks explains the so-called Kleiber’ scaling law, which states that an animal's metabolic rate scales to the ¾ power of the animal's mass (a cat having a mass 100 times that of a mouse will consume only about 32 times the energy the mouse uses). This scaling is sublinear because the power is less than 1. In the presentation, it will be shown that the infrastructure of cities (the length of electric cables or the number of gas stations) also follows universal sublinear scaling law while in socio-economic dimensions (GDP per capita, innovation, crime) cities are superlinear. They are as a result of the individual interactions proven by a large set of mobile phone data. The concept of scaling and universality is originated in statistical physics where a large complex system emerges from simple interactions, and its behavior is almost totally independent of its microscopic structure. Another examples are the democratic elections for which physics inspired models will be also discussed in the presentation. 

The talk is based mostly on the books of Geoffrey West: Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies and Stefan Thurner, Rudolf Hanel and Peter Klimek: Introduction to the theory of complex systems and the paper Social influence with recurrent mobility and multiple options by Jerome Michaud and Attila Szilva published in Physical Review E 97 (6), 062313.

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