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Complexity Primer

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Networks of Echoes

Part of the book series: Computational Social Sciences ((CSS))

Abstract

Complexity is one of those foundational concepts that is difficult to pin down without an operational definition. Even our intuition about complexity is not always reliable and because of that it is useful to consider how the concept originated and developed in the physical sciences before we apply it to the human sciences. In this chapter we try to provide enough explanation of the origins and development of complexity that the reader may develop an overview that is useful for interpreting the results obtained in the subsequent numerical calculations done on complex networks. However if the reader has experience with these ideas skipping this chapter would not be a hardship. If necessary one can always return to read sections as needed.

A man in daily muddy contact with field experiments could not be expected to have much faith in any direct assumption of independently distributed normal events…. George E. P. Box

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Bruce J. West & Malgorzata Turalska

  2. Information Sciences Directorate, Army Research Office, Research Triangle Park, NC, USA

    Bruce J. West

  3. Department of Physics, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA

    Paolo Grigolini

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  1. Bruce J. West
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  2. Malgorzata Turalska
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  3. Paolo Grigolini
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West, B.J., Turalska, M., Grigolini, P. (2014). Complexity Primer. In: Networks of Echoes. Computational Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04879-6_2

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