Introduction to Complex Systems

This course covers a broad range of fundamental topics relevant to the study of complex systems. The course work involves weekly readings focus on "classics" in the complex systems literature, in order to give students a broad, general understanding for the variety of work that falls under the rubric of complex systems. Topics to be covered will include evolutionary systems, self-organized criticality, measures of complexity, approaches to modeling complex adaptive systems, and emergence. Authors to be covered include Holland, Axelrod, Kaufmann, Bak, and Gell-Mann. Grading will be based on the participation in the discussions and on two or three term papers.