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.

Scholar Melanie Mitchell leads us on a detailed tour of the science of complexity, which seeks to explain how large-scale complex, organized, and adaptive behavior emerges from simple interactions among myriad individuals. This new approach goes beyond scientific reductionism and disciplinary boundaries.

Mitchell looks at complexity across a broad range of biological, technological, and social phenomena, seeking out the general principles or laws that apply to all of them. She also explores the relationship between complexity and evolution, artificial intelligence, computation, genetics, information processing, and many other fields.

Mitchell is a professor of computer science at Portland State University and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford University Press) is available for signing after the program.

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