Yaneer Bar-Yam

Yaneer Bar-Yam (born 1959, Boston, MA) is an American physicist, systems scientist and founding president of the New England Complex Systems Institute.

Biography

Yaneer Bar-Yam was born in Boston, MA in 1959. He received the B.S. degree in 1978 and the. Ph.D. degree in 1984. both in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a Bantrell PostDoctoral Fellow, and a joint postdoctoral fellow at MIT and IBM. After a junior faculty appointment at the Weizmann Institute.

In 1991 he became an Associate Professor of Engineering at Boston University. He left Boston University in 1997 to become president of the New England Complex Systems Institute. He is also Associate of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology of Harvard University. He is chairman of the International Conference on Complex Systems and managing editor of InterJournal.

Work

Bar-Yam studies the unified properties of complex systems as a systematic strategy for answering basic questions about the world. His research is focused both on formalizing complex systems concepts and relating them to everyday problems. In particular, he studies the relationship between observations at different scales, formal properties of descriptions of systems, the relationship of structure and function, the representation of information as a physical quantity, and quantitative properties of the complexity of real systems. Applications have been to physical, biological and social systems.

Bar-Yam has made further contributions to: the theory of the structural and electronic dynamics of materials; the theory of polymer dynamics and protein folding; the theory of neural networks and structure-function relationships; the theory of quantitative multiscale complexity; and, the theory of evolution.

Publications

Professor Bar-Yam was written several books and article. Books:

• 1978, The MIT three-element radio interferometer (miniferometer) and observations of Saturn at 1.35 cm, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Physics. Thesis. 1978. B.S by Yaneer Bar-Yam
• 1992, Lattice Effects in High-Tc Superconductors: Proceedings of the Conference, Santa Fe, New Mexico, January 13-15, 1992, with T. Egami, J. Mustre-Ed Leon and A. R. Bishop.
• 2003, Dynamics of Complex Systems, Westview Press, 864 pp.
• 2003, Unifying Themes in Complex Systems: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Complex Systems
• 2005, Making Things Work: Solving Complex Problems in a Complex World, Knowledge Press, 306 pp.
• 2007, Unifying Themes in Complex Systems, Vol. IIIB: New Research, with Ali A. Minai.

External links

• Yaneer Bar-Yam, New England Complex Systems Institute website, 2007.