Complex systems: a review

Abstract

Engineers have worked on complex systems ever since engineering began. But the sciences of complexity have come in to their own in the last few decades. Hoping to find common threads that weave their disciplines together, researchers from the fields of physics, biology, chemistry, math, computer science, economics, anthropology, linguistics, et al. have banded together to try to develop unifying frameworks for understanding complex systems. This paper reports on successes and failures of these efforts.