Melanie Mitchell (2)

What enables individually simple insects like ants to act with such precision and purpose as a group? How do trillions of individual neurons produce something as extraordinarily complex as consciousness? What is it that guides self-organizing structures like the immune system, the World Wide Web, the ... (more)global economy, and the human genome? These are just a few of the fascinating and elusive questions that the science of complexity seeks to answer. Come to Millar Library to learn more about the book Complexity: A Guided Tour and author and professor Melanie Mitchell. Dr. Mitchell's work focuses on developing new algorithms to enable computers to identify and analyze visual images. She earned her Ph.D. under one of the field's pioneers, Douglas R. Hofstadter, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

How do trillions of individual neurons produce consciousness? What guides self-organizing structures like the immune system, the Web, the global economy, and the human genome? These fascinating questions and many more are what the science of complexity seeks to answer.