Friday, 22 January 2010
Explaining Dynamically Complex Behavior
Meinard Kuhlmann, University of Bremen
12:05 pm, 817R Cathedral of Learning
Abstract: Complex systems in a large variety of contexts such as financial market crashes and congestive heart failure often display a surprisingly similar behavior and can be analyzed by the same methods. One reason for this is the sharply defined irrelevance of microscopic details when systems with many subunits interact in a non-linear way. My hypothesis is that most explanations for such dynamically complex behavior can be captured by invoking a generalized conception of mechanisms.