
Introduction to the Modeling and Analysis of Complex Systems - Schiphol
https://textbooks.opensuny.org/introduction-to-the-modeling-and-analysis-of-complex-systems/
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troelsSteegin
The book is designed to support an introductory class on systems - eg a 100
level or first year class. It's a little more technical than you might find in
a typical gen-ed quantitative reasoning class, but the material is presented
in a way that I think would be approachable from a STEM or non-STEM career
emphasis. I trained as an engineer, so I could be overstating that... There is
a pedagogical library, pyCX [0]. Overall, I like the design of the book, but
would say the intended audience is someone relatively early on their analytic
journey and may not serve the interests of the HN reader well.

It has a much broader perspective than Allen Downey's "Think Complexity" [1],
which is discrete systems (computational systems) focussed. Maybe you could
think about Downey's book is a non mathematical approach to algorithms.

Scott E Page's book "The Model Thinker" is more mathematical, at an undergrad
engineering level, and is more of a survey of models than a taxonomic overview
of systems modeling, which is what Sayama's [2] book, above, offers. A thesis
of Page's book is that there can be many ways to model a problem, and multiple
models help.

[0] [https://github.com/hsayama/PyCX](https://github.com/hsayama/PyCX) [1]
[http://www.allendowney.com/wp/books/](http://www.allendowney.com/wp/books/)
[2]
[http://bingweb.binghamton.edu/~sayama/](http://bingweb.binghamton.edu/~sayama/)

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sn9
The intro says it can be used at an advanced undergrad to early graduate
level. Depends on how much of the book one covers.

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Scipio_Afri
So is this a good open textbook? Does any open courseware or MOOC follow this
book or topics it covers?

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TeMPOraL
Seconding the question.

Also, what's the best not-necessarily-open textbook on the subject? I've been
meaning to dig into the topic in depth for a while, I could use a _good_
textbook.

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SurfingToad
Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos by Steven Strogatz is pretty good. Nonlinear
dynamics is one of the backbones of complex systems, so it's worth delving
into. Graph theory/topology is a close second. Complex Networks by Latora,
Nicosia, and Russo is a nice introduction to the graph-theoretical
perspective. Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell is a nice and brief
introduction. I can also recommend Spin Glasses and Complexity by Stein and
Newman. Spin glasses are basically the "model organism" of complexity science,
so it wouldn't hurt to get acquainted with them.

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TeMPOraL
Thank you!

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saeranv
What are some of the practical applications of complex modeling? I have a hard
time wrapping my head around where something like this would be used.

