Grand Challenge First-Year Seminar: From Pandemics to Politics: Modeling Complex Social System

Course Number: 66-146

Most of the major issues confronting humanity–such as injustice, discrimination, climate change, financial collapse, ecosystem survival, and disease epidemics–are the result of complex social systems. Such systems have multiple interacting parts that create a whole that is radically different than its constituent parts. Unfortunately, traditional scientific methods that focus on reducing systems to their parts and then analyzing each part provide little insight into complex systems. In this seminar, we will explore the behavior of complex social systems including issues such as discrimination and injustice. We will examine how to model and understand social issues using various tools such as computation and game theory, and various field perspectives including economics, finance, philosophy, political science, and sociology. As part of this class, students will collaborate in teams to develop their own models of social processes.

Academic Year: 2024-2025
Semester(s): Fall