Paul Bourgine Livres

What are the relations between the shape of a system of cities and that of fish school? Which events should happen in a cell in order that it participates to one of the finger of our hands? How to interpret the shape of a sand dune? This collective book written for the non-specialist addresses these questions and more generally, the fundamental issue of the emergence of forms and patterns in physical and living systems. It is a single book gathering the different aspects of morphogenesis and approaches developed in different disciplines on shape and pattern formation. Relying on the seminal works of D’Arcy Thompson, Alan Turing and René Thom, it confronts major examples like plant growth and shape, intra-cellular organization, evolution of living forms or motifs generated by crystals. A book essential to understand universal principles at work in the shapes and patterns surrounding us but also to avoid spurious analogies.

This book contains the proceedings as well as invited papers for the first annual conference of the UNESCO Unitwin Complex System Digital Campus (CSDC), which is an international initiative gathering 120 Universities on four continents, and structured in ten E-Departments. First Complex Systems Digital Campus World E-Conference 2015 features chapters from the latest research results on theoretical questions of complex systems and their experimental domains. The content contained bridges the gap between the individual and the collective within complex systems science and new integrative sciences on topics such as: genes to organisms to ecosystems, atoms to materials to products, and digital media to the Internet. The conference breaks new ground through a dedicated video-conferencing system – a concept at the heart of the international UNESCO UniTwin, embracing scientists from low-income and distant countries. This book promotes an integrated system of research, education, and training. It also aims at contributing to global development by taking into account its social, economic, and cultural dimensions. First Complex Systems Digital Campus World E-Conference 2015 will appeal to students and researchers working in the fields of complex systems, statistical physics, computational intelligence, and biological physics.

The social sciences study knowing subjects and their interactions. A „cog nitive turn“, based on cognitive science, has the potential to enrich these sciences considerably. Cognitive economics belongs within this movement of the social sciences. It aims to take into account the cognitive processes of individuals in economic theory, both on the level of the agent and on the level of their dynamic interactions and the resulting collective phenomena. This is an ambitious research programme that aims to link two levels of com plexity: the level of cognitive phenomena as studied and tested by cognitive science, and the level of collective phenomena produced by the economic in teractions between agents. Such an objective requires cooperation, not only between economists and cognitive scientists but also with mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists, in order to renew, study and simulate models of dynamical systems involving economic agents and their cognitive mechanisms. The hard core of classical economics is the General Equilibrium Theory, based on the optimising rationality of the agent and on static concepts of equilibrium, following a point of view systemised in the framework of Game Theory. The agent is considered „rational“ if everything takes place as if he was maximising a function representing his preferences, his utility function.