Studentships

There are 10 fully funded 4-year EPSRC PhD studentships available every year. We expect to admit a cohort of at least 20 students per year. Applications for October 2010 are invited now.

What is Complexity Science?

Famously, the physicist Stephen Hawking has predicted that the 21st Century will be "the century of complexity". What did he mean?

Research at the ICSS falls within what has come to be called Complexity Science, an attempt to better understand systems in which aggregate, system-level behaviour arises from the interactions between component parts in a way that is not straightforward. Whereas the temperature of an ideal gas is just a simple average over the kinetic energy of its component molecules, the "temperature" of a football crowd or the temperature of the earth do not behave in the same way. Adding some more energy to some of the gas molecules will increase the macroscopic temperature proportionally. By contrast, adding a little more "heat" to a few members of a football crowd can result in a disproportionate, or non-linear, change in behaviour, sometimes bringing about macroscopic surges, songs, and even Mexican waves. This kind of interesting relationship between the individual components of a system and the system's global behaviour is characteristic of many important and intriguing domains: ecosystems, brains, cities, markets, the internet.

The growing significance of understanding and managing such systems means that Complexity Science is increasingly being recognised as a critical area of enquiry by industry, government and science itself.

For more information, click here.

Contact

If you have any queries or questions, please do not hesitate to contact the Institute director, Seth Bullock (+44 23 8059 4510, icss@soton.ac.uk).