Introduction to Complexity

The Santa Fe Institute offers a new free online course. Sounds good! Fractal, chaos and network theory will become clearly more important also in economic theory. The course might be a good start to get familiar with the stuff.

 

Here the announcement from the website:

 

 

Beginning January 28, SFI will offer a series of massive open online courses (MOOCs) in complex systems science.

The first course, "Introduction to Complexity," will be an accessible introduction to the field, with no pre-requisites and no course fees. It is free and open to anyone.

"You don't need a science or math background to take this introductory course," says SFI External Professor Melanie Mitchell, the course's instructor. "It simply requires an interest in the field and the willingness to participate in a hands-on approach to the subject."

In this ten-week course, participants will learn about the tools used by complex systems scientists to understand, and sometimes to control, complex systems. Topics include dynamics, chaos, fractals, information theory, computation theory, evolution and adaptation, agent-based modeling, and networks.

"You’ll also get a sense of how these topics fit together to help explain how complexity arises and evolves in nature, society, and technology," she says.

Mitchell is an SFI External Professor, a professor of computer science at Portland State University, and author of the award-winning book Complexity: A Guided Tour. 

The course, "Introduction to Complexity," begins January 28.

To receive e-mail updates about how to register for this course, please visit the course website.

Read about the course on Sean Carroll's blog "Preposterous Universe" (December 21, 2012)