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Throughout nature, throngs of relatively simple elements can self-organize into behaviors that seem unexpectedly complex. Scientists are beginning to understand why and how these phenomena emerge without a central organizing entity.
When a crystallographer treated prime numbers as a system of particles, the resulting diffraction pattern created a new view of existing conjectures in number theory.
By reimagining the kinks and folds of origami as atoms in a lattice, researchers are uncovering strange behavior hiding in simple structures.
The new experiments suggest that simple models can explain the behavior of thousands of interacting organisms.
Computational physicist Sharon Glotzer is uncovering the rules by which complex collective phenomena emerge from simple building blocks.
A potent theory has emerged explaining a mysterious statistical law that arises throughout physics and mathematics.
Nature’s large-scale patterns emerge from incomplete surveys that borrow ideas from information theory.
An insight borrowed from computer science suggests that evolution values both fitness and diversity.
An MIT physicist has proposed the provocative idea that life exists because the law of increasing entropy drives matter to acquire lifelike physical properties.