A murmuration of starlings. Photo: Walter Baxter, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Emergence is a concept that's become quite famous in popular culture, but still has a ring of the magical and mystical about it. In this podcast we talk to Chris Budd, Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Bath, about what emergence is and where we can observe it.

We also listen to some music that has emerged from a cellular automaton, and see how one can go about modelling the behaviour of those most complex of animals: human beings. And as usual, we will explore some maths in one minute.

To find out more about these issues in our series of articles by Chris Budd.

The music in this podcast was created using the software Visions of Chaos, produced by Softology. You can listen to a longer version of the piece on YouTube.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking the download link below, and you can subscribe to our podcast feed in your podcast aggregator of choice, or directly through Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

This podcast was partially funded by the European Mathematical Society.