Emergence as Harmony
Regular price
€207.08
A01=Venkat Venkatasubramanian
Author_Venkat Venkatasubramanian
Category=GPFC
Category=PBT
Category=PBWS
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
forthcoming
Product details
- ISBN 9780231224574
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 25 Aug 2026
- Publisher: Columbia University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Emergent phenomena occur when complex systems exhibit properties and behaviors that their individual parts do not have. They are found across scales and fields, from the collective intelligence of bird flocks in biology to inequality and segregation patterns in economics and sociology. Are there unifying principles underlying these seemingly different examples? How do order and collective behavior emerge from chaos through self-organization?
Venkat Venkatasubramanian shows that a novel paradigm—statistical teleodynamics—can explain emergence. This unified theory represents a transdisciplinary synthesis integrating concepts from various fields. Venkatasubramanian formulates a mathematical framework for understanding emergent phenomena across domains, spanning physics, biology, ecology, economics, sociology, and artificial intelligence. He demonstrates that the organizational principle of emergent systems is maximizing harmony, which he examines various ways to measure. Emergence as Harmony offers new answers to fundamental questions on topics ranging from income inequality to large language models and neural networks.
Venkat Venkatasubramanian shows that a novel paradigm—statistical teleodynamics—can explain emergence. This unified theory represents a transdisciplinary synthesis integrating concepts from various fields. Venkatasubramanian formulates a mathematical framework for understanding emergent phenomena across domains, spanning physics, biology, ecology, economics, sociology, and artificial intelligence. He demonstrates that the organizational principle of emergent systems is maximizing harmony, which he examines various ways to measure. Emergence as Harmony offers new answers to fundamental questions on topics ranging from income inequality to large language models and neural networks.
Venkat Venkatasubramanian is the Samuel Ruben–Peter G. Viele Professor of Engineering at Columbia University. He is the author of How Much Inequality Is Fair? Mathematical Principles of a Moral, Optimal, and Stable Capitalist Society (Columbia, 2017).
