This year, the Complexity Science Hub celebrates its 10th anniversary. Throughout our anniversary year, we’re spotlighting one research topic every month – starting with Foundations of Complex Systems in July. In this interview, group leader Stefan Thurner shares a personal take.
If you had to explain what your group does to someone at a dinner party, what would you say?
Do you know if you’ll run into a traffic jam tonight? Or why a common cold cannot be cured? Right! Because traffic and epidemics are complex systems! Since it would be so helpful to understand these systems a little bit better in thousands of applications, we try to find out how one can understand them – so that you can use that understanding not only in theory but in real life.
What are you working on right now that you can't stop thinking about?
How do networks like supply chains or social networks compute? What do they actually compute? And what could they compute if one understood how they do it?
What's the tangled part of this problem that makes it so hard to crack?
The hard part is to find a framework for it. A mathematical way of framing the problem such that it becomes answerable.
What would you love to have changed five years from now?
Help make supply chains more resilient and make human societies less polarized.
What is complexity, to you?
Complexity is the co-evolutionary phenomenon where networks change the states of the nodes they are composed of, and the changes in the nodes, in return, change the networks that connect them. If you have these two things happening at the same time, the system is complex.
What does a typical workday look like for you?
Bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy, science, bureaucracy, bureaucracy.
What pulled you into this field in the first place?
A deep interest in what holds the world together. I started with forces between elementary particles and ended here.
When you're stuck – what do you do?
Has your research ever changed your mind about something you were sure of?
All the time. For example, I was sure that one could never make an economy visible and actually see how every firm interacts with all the others.
Looking back over CSH's 10 years, what's surprised you most about how your topic evolved?
That some of the things really seem to work and that others are picking them up and use them.
What advice would you give your younger self starting out in this work?
To become able to see and formulate good problems that can be answered with science. And to nurture a desire to solve problems, not “close research gaps.” There is a big difference.
What is a question you have never been asked before but would you like to be asked?
What keeps you going despite all challenges?
Is there a tool, model, or dataset you'd be lost without?
As long as I have MATLAB and LaTeX, I am independent and can do things I want to do.
For more information on this research topic: https://csh.ac.at/news/foundations-of-complex-systems-whats-it-all-about/
