The Surprising Math Of Cities And Corporations
Wednesday, August 3, 2011 - 07:40
in Mathematics & Economics
The quality of TED talks is in free fall and has gotten only worse since the last time I mentioned this. So it is worth to point to a rare good presentation whenever one comes along.Geoffrey West’s The Surprising Math Of Cities And Corporations shows nicely how other than biological systems, namely cities and corporations, undergo similar evolutionary shaping by natural selection, even though they do not necessarily die or go through generations. Therefore, they can be described - and their development predicted - with simple scaling laws, which physicists like yours truly always find endearing (since that is all we ever really do).read more