New Perspectives on Complexity

I would like in this presentation to explain why the study of complexity has become so interesting today. The idea of studying complex systems is, of course, by no means new. Some 2,000 years ago, Aristotle had already studied domains as varied as marine biology and the political organization of towns. But, it is our present situation, rather, which is, in a sense, unique. When one thinks of complex phenomena, one immediately thinks of biology, society, economics, or areas of this kind, and when one thinks about simple phenomena, the repeatable experiments of physics and chemistry and the domain of planetary motion are what spring naturally to mind. The remarkable feature of our time is that the gap between these two sets of phenomena has narrowed dramatically.