Potential Topics:

(Note: this list is undoubtedly incomplete, in no particular order, and subject to change; more detailed treatments of many of the topics that follow will appear in the advanced courses.)
  • Definitions and background
    • Complex (adaptapive) systems
    • Weak and strong emergence
    • Measures of complexity
  • Scaling phenomena
    • Zipf's law
    • Non-Gaussian statistics and power-law size distributions
    • Sample mechanisms leading to power-law size distributions
    • Allometry
    • Organisms and organizations
    • Scaling of social phenomena: crime, creativity, and consumption.
  • Growth mechanisms (part of above story)
    • Size distributions
    • Agglomeration processes
    • Accretion processes
  • Multiscale complex systems
    • Hierarchies and scaling
    • Modularity
    • Form and context in design
  • Complexity in abstract models
    • The game of life
    • Cellular automata
    • Chaos and order---creation and maintenance
  • Integrity of complex systems
    • Generic failure mechanisms
    • Network robustness
    • Highly optimized tolerance: Robustness and fragility
    • Normal accidents and high reliability theory
  • Complex networks
    • Small-world networks
    • Scale-free networks
  • Collective behavior and contagion in social systems
    • Percolation and phase transitions
    • Disease spreading models
    • Schelling's model of segregation
    • Granovetter's model of imitation
    • Contagion on networks
    • Herding phenomena
    • Cooperation
    • Success inequality: superstardom
  • Collective decision making
    • Theories of social choice
    • The role of randomness and chance
    • Systems of voting
    • Juries
  • Distribution and redistribution networks
    • Single source supply networks
    • Distributed source supply networks
  • Information
    • Search in networked systems (e.g., the WWW, social systems)
    • Search on scale-free networks
    • Knowledge trees, metadata and tagging
  • Network analysis and visualization
    • Jung
    • Pajek
    • Graphviz
    • SoNIA