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News and Views: About Complexity and Why to Care

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Abstract

What is nowadays ubiquitously referred to as complexity emerges in a wide variety of natural, artificial, and social systems. This very rich concept is nontrivial to understand and is therefore hard to operationally define. Consequently, along the years, many intertwined characterizations have been proposed in the literature. Among those, a powerful and practical one consists in focusing on the entropic and statistical mechanical aspects of the system. We attempt here to put this active line of research into a contemporary perspective.

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Acknowledgments

C. Beck, T. Bountis, L.J.L. Cirto, A. Coniglio, E.M.F. Curado, M. Gell-Mann, P. Grigolini, H.J. Herrmann, H.J. Jensen, F.D. Nobre, A. Pluchino, A. Rapisarda, U. Tirnakli, and many others are warmly acknowledged for the fruitful discussions. I also acknowledge the partial financial support by CNPq, FAPERJ, and CAPES (Brazilian agencies).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas F´ısicas and National Institute of Science and Technology for Complex Systems, Rua Xavier Sigaud 150, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 22290-180, Brazil

    Constantino Tsallis

  2. Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM, 87501, USA

    Constantino Tsallis

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  1. Constantino Tsallis
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Correspondence to Constantino Tsallis.

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Tsallis, C. News and Views: About Complexity and Why to Care. Braz J Phys 44, 283–285 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13538-013-0154-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13538-013-0154-x

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