François Lafond

SFI News:

The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) will hold a seminar at 12:15 p.m. Wednesday, July 2 in the Collins Conference Room at SFI.

François Lafond, Research Fellow, London Institute for Mathematical Scienc (LIMS), and Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School is the featured speaker. He will give a talk entitled “The Evolution of Knowledge Systems.” The SFI host is Doyne Farmer.

Abstract: The creation and allocation of economic wealth ultimately relies on the creation and diffusion of knowledge. As a result, understanding the dynamics, organization and viability of economies requires an in-depth analysis of knowledge systems. This work proposes to study knowledge systems as growing two-mode (bipartite) networks. It is found that: (i) through self-organization, innovation and face-to-face diffusion result in a stable power law distribution of ideas’ popularity; (ii) this dynamic is compatible with the observed (shifted) power law distribution of citations among scientific papers, and (iii) the generalized beta size-rank relation observed for patent classes can be explained by a slowdown in the growth of the number of classes, relative to the number of patents. The general lesson from this work is that knowledge systems often exhibit non-equilibrium and non-linear dynamics, casting some doubts as to their long term viability.  

Note: SFI is unable to accommodate members of the public for SFI’s limited lunch service; attendees are welcome to bring their own.

Click here to view the online event listing.

The Santa Fe Institute is a nonprofit research center in Santa Fe. Its scientists collaborate across disciplines to understand the complex systems that underlie critical questions for science and humanity. The Institute is supported by philanthropic individuals and foundations, forward-thinking partner companies, and government science agencies.