News from the world of maths

The Internet is huge. With mobile phones and other devices now being hooked up as well as computers, it will soon comprise many billions of endpoints. In sheer size and complexity the Internet is not far off the human brain with its hundred billion neurons linked up by around ten thousand trillion individual connections. If you're finding it hard even to read these huge numbers off the page, how can anyone be expected to cope with complexity on this vast scale? While mathematical tools that deal with complexity have experienced rapid development it recent years, there still isn't an overarching science of complexity, a mathematical toolbox serving everyone who's dealing with it in whatever shape or form.

This month a group of experts from a range of different areas got together in Cambridge to try and remedy the situation. It was the first ever meeting of the Cambridge Complex Systems Consortium. Delegates included a climate scientist, a former head of MI6, a neuroscientist, a sociologists, and a mathematician. Plus went to see them, to learn about their struggle with complexity.

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