Readings, etc. - Complex Systems Summer School
Tom Carter

These are some readings, etc., related to the SFI Complex Systems Summer School, 2008. I'll be adding things as we go along . . .

  • These are lecture notes on Information Theory:

        Information theory and entropy.

  • For those who were there Tuesday evening (and also for those who couldn't make it :-) -- special!

         The Power Law Blues (mp3)      (enjoy!)      ( Power Law lyrics )      (It's probably OK to take the log of your hat, but don't do this to your cat :-)

  • Here is a pdf of the "What is Interdisciplinary" notes:

        Interdisciplinary.pdf

  • Here is a pdf of the "What shape is a circle" notes:

        Circles.pdf

  • Here is a pdf of the "Perspective in Art" stuff (note: 6.5Mb):

        perspective.pdf

  • Here are some brief notes on "fractional derivatives" -- one way to define them:

        fractional_deriv.pdf

  • Here are some notes on "symbolic dynamics"

        Symbolic Dynamics.pdf

  • Here are some notes on "Simpson's Paradox"

        Simpsons-Paradox.pdf

  • Here are some notes on assessing risk (and the so-called "doomsday argument")

        risks.pdf

  • Here are some notes on voting (related to Arrow's Theorem . . .)

        voting

  • Here is a short path through some parts of my "entropy" notes focusing on the "economic" (also ideal gas . . .) models, but there is also an additional section on power laws

        A short trip through entropy to power laws

  • Speaking of power laws (and economics), here is some stuff I wrote a while back about "social insurance" of various forms, tax policy, and economic issues . . .

        social insurance

  • Here is a pdf on fractal dimension (including a couple of examples with fractal dimension exactly 1 . . .):

        Fractal-Dimension.pdf

  • Here are some lecture notes on linear algebra (including a section on eigenvalues / eigenvectors), which in the past have been part of a "Math review" for the Summer School.

        Brief Survey of Linear Algebra

  • Here is a page linking to several models (including the economy/wealth model and the "most different" model I talked about on Friday:

        models (NetLogo and RePast)

  • Here are some notes on Computation Theory, which may come in handy for various lectures. These are notes from some lectures I have given during previous Summer Schools:

        Computation theory.

  • This is the current version of the "Theories and Models" material (it's rough -- I'm still working on it . . .):

        Theories and Models (Making sense)

  • Here is MatLab code for some of the Takens' embedding process. This code was written by a CSSS 2003 project group (that included Aaron Clauset) to analyze data from a water wheel experiment. It is largely derived from material in a book by H. Abarbanel ("Analysis of Observed Chaotic Data" -- a very good book, definitely worth looking into if you are analyzing time series or other large data sets), and includes false nearest neighbor / embedding dimension code, etc.

        FNN.m (false nearest neighbor)

        analwheel.m (some other analysis tools)

  • Here are some notes on quantum computation. These are notes from summer school lectures I gave a few years ago. Some parts may be a bit out of date, but they do give the flavor of the topic:

        quantum computation

  • This is Claude Shannon's classic 1948 paper on information, entropy, and communication theory.

        Claude Shannon's paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" (and also a site with some background.)


  • Some notes on random walks:

        A random walk in random walks (in progress)

  • A chaos/nonlinear systems explorer - written in java:

        Chaos explorer.


    Questions or comments may be mailed to:

    tom at astarte.csustan.edu