Professor Richard A Blythe
Personal Chair of Complex Systems
School of Physics and Astronomy
University of Edinburgh
Personal Chair of Complex Systems
School of Physics and Astronomy
University of Edinburgh
Statistical physicists aim to predict and understand the patterns and structures that emerge in systems with many interacting parts. In the absence of any flow (of matter, energy, or anything else) classical theories allow us to achieve this. A major contemporary physics challenge is to extend these theories to driven systems, whether externally (e.g., beating an egg with a whisk) or internally (e.g. birds flapping their wings to fly).
Systems of human behaviour, like language, emerge through interacting with, and learning from, other members in a society. We apply mathematical and computational techniques to understand these emergence processes and their products, determining what kind of interactions allow for the kinds of outcomes we see and whether they do so on the same timescales.
Much of this work is with colleagues at the Centre for Language Evolution.
I currently serve as Editor-in-Chief of EPL, a letters journal exploring the frontiers of physics, which is owned by a consortium of European physical societies.
If you wish to contact me in this capacity, please use the email address below (not my regular address).