TONIGHT: Public Lecture: 'Complexity: A Guided Tour' by Melanie Mitchell, Oct. 20

Thursday, Oct. 20, 7 p.m.
Fine Arts Building, Room 150

What enables individually simple insects like ants to act with such precision and purpose as a group? What is it that guides self-organizing structures like the immune system, the World Wide Web, the 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 hear Melanie Mitchell explore these and other topics at her lecture and book signing.

Melanie Mitchell is professor of Computer Science at Portland State University and external professor and member of the Science Board at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the author or editor of five books and over 70 scholarly papers in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and complex systems. Her most recent book, Complexity: A Guided Tour is the winner of the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award, and was named by Amazon.com as one of the 10 best science books of 2009.