Abstract
AbstractThe centennial of the Ising model marks a century of interdisciplinary contributions that extend well beyond ferromagnets, including the evolution of language, volatility in financial markets, mood swings, scientific collaboration, the persistence of unintended neighborhood segregation, and asymmetric hysteresis in political polarization. The puzzle is how anything could be learned about social life from a toy model of second order ferromagnetic phase transitions on a periodic network. Our answer points to Ising’s deeper contribution: a bottom-up modeling approach that explores phase transitions in population behavior that emerge spontaneously through the interplay of individual choices at the micro-level of interactions among network neighbors.
Funder
National Science Foundation
United States Department of Defense | Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
EC | Horizon 2020 Framework Programme
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
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