Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

by M. Mitchell Waldrop

This self-organization theme was also taken up in a quite different form by Stephen Wolfram of the Institute for Advanced Study, a twenty-five-year-old wunderkind from England who was trying to investigate the phenomenon of complexity at the most fundamental level. Indeed, he was already negotiating with the University of Illinois to found a Center for Complex Systems Research there. Whenever you look at very complicated systems in physics or biology, he said, you generally find that the basic components and the basic laws are quite simple; the complexity arises because you have a great many of these simple components interacting simultaneously. The complexity is actually in the organization—the myriad possible ways that the components of the system can interact.