Foundational Papers in Complexity Science

Biographical Oddities, Volume 4*

Editor’s note: In life we retain control over (some of) the details of our existence. Dates and details provided here reflect the information authors are willing to share broadly.

William Brian Arthur | July 31, 1945 –  | c.f. Chapters 67, 77
Arthur left Belfast shortly after the British army occupied the city as part of Operation Banner. He initially began a PhD at the University of Michigan because, when given an alphabetized list of prospective schools by a supervisor, the Ann Arbor address was listed first.

When making his now-famous model for the El Farol Bar Problem, Arthur changed the day on which live Irish music was actually performed from Wednesday to Thursday, so as to bury the lede and further prevent the over-crowding that he was modeling. 

Alan Stuart Perelson | April 11, 1947 –  |  c.f. Chapters 68, 79
In the 1950 US census, Perelson’s name is spelled wrong and then awkwardly crossed out. 

Perelson is an experienced woodworker.

In 2014, Thomson Reuters ranked Perelson as one of the “World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” of the previous decade. 

John Archibald Wheeler | July 9, 1911 – April 13, 2008  |  c.f. Chapter 70
Allegedly, a student in 1967 suggested the term “black hole” to Wheeler, which he adopted. This is one origin story for the coining of the term.

At his summer home in Maine, Wheeler liked to fire beer cans from an old cannon on the property for fun.

In 1953, while traveling by train, Wheeler misplaced classified political documents and plans pertaining to the H-bomb. He insisted that he wedged the file behind a toilet and accidentally left it, but ran back moments later to find the envelope empty. Wheeler was reprimanded, but others lost their jobs over the incident, including Joint Committee on Atomic Energy director William Borden, who had prepared the documents for Wheeler. Borden subsequently turned his attention to J. Robert Oppenheimer, based on information he prepared for Wheeler’s file, alleging that Oppenheimer was a Soviet spy, which ultimately led to the security hearing that removed Oppenheimer’s Q clearance. The file was never found.

William Samuel Bialek | Aug. 14, 1960 –  | c.f. Chapter 71 
Bialek’s parents were born in 1918 and 1919, in areas of Russia that would soon become part of Poland. His father was born on the day the Treaty of Versailles was ratified, and so he often joked to his son that when he was born he was Russian in the morning and Polish by the evening. 

Bialek credits the inspiration behind his initial drive to study physics to a biographical profile of Isidor Rabi, written by Jeremy Bernstein in 1975, which changed his teenage view of what a physicist could be and do.

Frederick Martin Rieke | 1966 –  | c.f. Chapter 71
Rieke is the principal investigator for his own laboratory at the University of Washington. Among the list of Rieke Lab associates provided on the lab’s website, Rieke lists his two children as honorary “former members” of the lab.

Robert de Ruyter van Steveninck | May 31, 1954 –  | c.f. Chapter 71
At the University of California, Berkeley, after painting the walls of physics classroom 397 floor-to-ceiling with blackboard paint, van Steveninck, Warland, Bialek, and Rieke covered the room with equations and figures and together conceived of the ideas for their book, Spikes: Exploring the Neural Code, in chalk.

David Karsten Warland | 1963 –  | c.f. Chapter 71
He is the son of composer and conductor Dale Warland, who is one of the only choral conductors ever to be inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame.

Warland owns and operates a small farm, plays the cello, and is a talented woodworker who once made a wooden model of the famous “rainbow bridge” of China.

John H. Miller | Sept. 8, 1959 –  |  c.f. Chapter 72
Born into the fourth generation of a family of cattle ranchers, Miller grew up ranching and learned to bring in cattle on horseback. Several of his family members preferred to bring the cattle in with Cadillacs rather than horses or ATVs.

He was the Santa Fe Institute’s first postdoc and has remained involved with the Institute ever since.

Miller learned to scuba dive in his home state of Colorado. In high school and college he was a professional diver, working in Colorado as well as in the British Overseas Territories in the West Indies.

Kristian Lindgren | Aug. 30, 1960 –  |  c.f. Chapter 73
At the time of publication, Lindgren is currently hard at work designing and building his very own space observatory on an island called Flatön off of the West coast of Sweden.

Lindgren is one of the founders of the masters program in complex adaptive systems at his alma mater, Chalmers University of Technology.

John Stephen Lansing | May 19, 1950 –  |  c.f. Chapter 75
In 2018, Lansing took a team of researchers into dense jungle in Indonesian Borneo to meet with a group of nomadic, traditionally cave-dwelling hunter–gatherers. This small group, the Punan Batu, can trace their genetics back some 7,000 years, largely independent of other local indigenous groups and Austronesian peoples. After Lansing and his team agreed to help the Punan Batu defend their rights to keep their ancestral homesites safe from deforestation, evidence of the group’s genetic descent, as well as their unique song-language, convinced the Regency of Bulungan to support the Punan Batu in their conservation claims.

James Nevin Kremer | July 19, 1945 –  | c.f. Chapter 75
Kremer met Lansing by complete happenstance when both were surfing at the same beach in Southern California, shortly after Lansing had realized the project in Bali could really benefit from bringing an ecologist on board . . .

Nineteenth-century American composer and pianist Ethelbert Nevin is a distant relation of Kremer’s and the source of his middle name. 

Melanie Mitchell | 1958 –  | c.f. Chapter 76
After reading Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, Mitchell was determined to work with Hofstadter, and wrote him a letter to this effect. It recevied no reply. A year later, she spoke to him after he gave a lecture at MIT and called several times, but he never got back to her. Finally, Mitchell called Hofstadter after hours at 11:00 pm, and he answered the phone. Impressed by Mitchell’s ideas and persistence, Hofstadter agreed to supervise her work on the analogy-making program CopyCat, and she began her PhD under his supervision shortly thereafter.

Peter Thomas Hraber  |  1967 –  |  c.f. Chapter 76
Hraber plays the bagpipes and has been a member of Albuquerque & Four Corners Pipes & Drums, a Los Alamos-based bagpipe band.

Among the dedications in his PhD dissertation, Hraber thanks his two terriers for providing emotional support during his grad school years.

Stephanie Forrest |  1958 –  |  c.f. Chapter 79
In the early years of the Santa Fe Institute, space was at a premium and the Institute went through several major relocations. At one juncture, Forrest shared an office with SFI founder George Cowan, who enjoyed babysitting Forrest’s infant child when she occasionally brought her to the office. 

Forrest is an avid horseback rider and has trained several horses herself.

Rajesh Cherukuri |  1970 –  |  c.f. Chapter 79
Cherukuri’s undergraduate alma mater, Osmania University, is the seventh oldest in India. 

According to Cherukuri, during his tenure as Vice President of Engineering for Bomgar Corporation, his leadership and changes to the department increased company revenue from $20 million to $100 million.

Walter Fontana  |  Dec. 3, 1960 –  |  c.f. Chapter 80
Fontana is a retired single-engine airplane pilot and paraglider pilot with a P4 rating, the second-highest rating in paragliding, which requires upwards of 200 logged flights and over 75 hours of flight time.

Born in the South Tyrol region of Italy,  Fontana’s birthplace is formally registered as Merano/Meran, as local law requires both Italian and German designations for placenames, due to the region’s proximity to Germany.

Peter Florian Stadler  |  Dec. 24, 1965 – |  c.f. Chapter 80
In 1997, Stadler was drafted into mandatory military service, an assignment which brought him no joy. On his personal website, as of the publication of this volume, he describes his time in the military with one hand-typed emoticon:  :-(

Stadler is a connoisseur of chile peppers and New Mexican recipes. He is also an aficionado of Austrian and German beer varieties.

Ivo Ludwig Hofacker  |  Nov. 23, 1964 –  |  c.f. Chapter 80
In the acknowledgements to the publication of ViennaRNA 2.0, a follow-up to the widely successful ViennaRNA package on which Hofacker also worked, the authors, including Hofacker, dedicate the new package to Peter Schuster in honor of his seventieth birthday. 

Murray Gell-Mann | Sept. 15, 1929 – May 24, 2019   | c.f. Chapter 81
A lifelong birder, Gell-Mann especially enjoyed birding with his older brother, Ben. 

Gell-Mann and his first wife, Margaret, owned and bred Siberian huskies and Burmese cats for many years. While Carl Sagan was housesitting for the Gell-Manns, their beloved show cat Shadow escaped the house and went missing. Sagan forgot to write the couple a letter to let them know the cat was lost until a month afterwards.

He was an avid collector of art, coins, stamps, neckties, and restaurant menus.

Seth Lloyd | Aug. 2, 1960 – |  c.f. Chapter 81
During his senior year of high school, Lloyd won four merit awards, including several for science and the classics, and was elected to the school’s cum laude society.

In 2022, Lloyd starred in a sci-fi short film called “Steeplechase,” the first of an ongoing mini-series following Lloyd and fellow physicist Michele Reilly on violent paradoxical excursions through time and reality, encountering alternate versions of themselves. Lloyd will also star in the next installment in the series, “Stag Hunt.”

F. John Odling-Smee | Oct. 10, 1935 – | c.f. Chapter 82
Born in the United Kingdom, Odling-Smee joined the Royal Navy at age 18 and became a pilot in training in the Fleet Air Arm at the height of the Cold War. When told that there was the slightest possibility that he might be instructed to drop an H-bomb on a Soviet territory, he left the Navy.

For a time, Odling-Smee was a journalist at two major newspapers in Bristol, where he worked with then-unknown playwright Sir Tom Stoppard, who encouraged him to apply to undergraduate programs at University College London. Odling-Smee took the advice and began his research career.

Kevin N. Lala | Oct. 5, 1962 – |  c.f. Chapter 82
When he was born, Lala’s family name was Laland. Of Parsi Indian heritage, Lala’s family had chosen to anglicize their last name in an effort to mitigate difficulties their children faced due to racism. In 2023, to celebrate his heritage and reconnect to his roots, he officially changed his name to its original form, Lala.

Lala has studied social learning and imitation his entire career. He has passed this habit of imitation onto the next generation, he discovered; while mowing the lawn, his son follows along with a fake lawnmower. Just like dad!

Marcus Feldman | Nov. 14, 1942 –  | c.f. Chapter 82
While Feldman’s father was an engineer, he encouraged his son to take up any career he wanted. However, Feldman senior had a talent for math, a trait his son strove to mirror, leading to the younger Feldman’s love of mathematics. While biology was not in his plan for his long-term career, Feldman says the only other path he considered, besides math, was psychiatry.

Geoffrey Brian West | Dec. 15, 1940 –  | c.f. Chapter 83
In May of 2006, West was named one of the Time 100 for the year by Time Magazine. 

In 2012, West was a consultant for the popular Science channel documentary series “Through the Wormhole,” on an episode dealing with the fine-tuned universe and questions about the driving forces behind the existence of the universe as we know it.

James Hemphill Brown | Sept. 25, 1942 –  | c.f. Chapter 83
Brown has had a lifelong interest in natural history, beginning at a young age, which he attributes to the influences of two Cornell women: Sally Spofford, an administrative assistant at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, and Brown’s own mother, Catherine Brown, who earned her master’s in zoology at Cornell.

Brian Joseph Enquist | March 4, 1969 –  | c.f. Chapter 83
In high school, Enquist was the recorded voice for the Wilmington, Delaware morning and afternoon automated call-in weather forecasts.

Enquist has climbed some 40% of Colorado’s “fourteeners,” the fifty-three mountain peaks in the state of Colorado that exceed 14,000 feet in elevation.

In college, Enquist and a few friends decided to start a business—“Three Guys and a Truck—Moving & Landscaping”—to break into both aforementioned industries at once, but the venture struggled to take off, so Enquist returned to his previous college job, bagging groceries.

David Hilton Wolpert | 1961 –  | c.f. Chapter 84
Wolpert is a writer of illustrative prose and free-form poetry, often presented online alongside photographs and experiences of his.

A quote of Wolpert’s, which heads up a section of his website, is “I am not smart enough to be a mathematician, nor careful enough to be an experimentalist. Everything else is fair game.”

William G. Macready | March 23, 1963 –  | c.f. Chapter 84
Macready looks back fondly on his time as a postdoctorate researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, during which time this paper with Wolpert was published. His best ideas, he believes, often came to him while hiking in the mountains in Santa Fe with coworkers and friends. 

Shun-Ichi Amari | Jan. 3, 1936 – | c.f. Chapter 85
Amari is an avid player of the Japanese strategy game Go. He laments that computer programs like DeepMind’s AlphaGo Zero are capable of beating many of the world’s top Go players. In his retirement, Amari happily spends his time playing Go with other humans instead.

Samuel Stebbins Bowles | 1939 – | c.f. Chapter 86
In the US 1940 census, Bowles is listed among his family as the youngest “daughter,” a clerical error. 

Chester Bowles, Bowles’s father, was a diplomat who served in his career as a congressman, the governor of Connecticut, an Under Secretary of State, and twice served as US Ambassador to India. On his first assignment to India, he moved his family there with him, including then-twelve-year-old Samuel.

In 1967, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King asked Bowles to contribute a paper as background material for his Poor People’s March. Driving King to a canvassing event in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Bowles mentioned his boyhood interest in Buddhism and nonviolence, stemming from his childhood years in India. During this hurried drive, Bowles narrowly avoided colliding with a bus, after which King remarked, “you certainly don’t drive nonviolently, young man.”

Duncan James Watts | Feb. 20, 1971 – | c.f. Chapter 87
Watts is an excellent rock climber. In 1996, he and two friends climbed the Nose of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. A harrowing 3,000-foot ascent, the climb took them five days to complete. 

Born in Canada, Watts was raised in his parents’ home countries of Australia and Scotland. At 16, he joined the Royal Australian Navy and went into officer training while simultaneously studying physics. During this time, he read James Gleick’s Chaos, which inspired his interest in nonlinear dynamics.

Steven Henry Strogatz | Aug. 13, 1959 – | c.f. Chapter 87
At age nine, Strogatz won the Punt, Pass, and Kick football contest in his hometown of Torrington, Connecticut. He refers to this as the high point of his football career. 

Strogatz is a world-class chess player. In 2006, the Cornell Chess Club invited American chess grandmaster Larry Christiansen to a simultaneous exhibition, and Strogatz signed up to play on a whim. Strogatz beat the grandmaster after several hours of play, the only competitor in the group of thirty-five to do so.

Robert Betts Laughlin | Nov. 1, 1950 –  | c.f. Chapter 88
When Laughlin received the call announcing his Nobel Prize win in 1998, he had recently “fixed” the phone in his bedroom, unintentionally rendering it silent. The landline connected the call instead to his young son’s bedroom, where it came through on his Mickey Mouse-themed telephone. Laughlin jokes that he must be the only person to ever receive their Nobel news via Mickey Mouse phone.

The premise of Laughlin’s paper, “Pumped Thermal Grid Storage with Heat Exchange,” became the inspiration for what is now the product of Malta, Inc., a thermoelectric energy storage system which, on its own or when combined with any currently viable source of electricity generation—power plants, solar arrays, wind farms, etc.—can store energy for upwards of a week and reconvert it to electricity as needed without using hazardous materials.

David Pines | June 8, 1924 – May 3, 2018 | c.f. Chapter 88
In 1944, shortly after beginning graduate school in Berkeley, twenty-year-old Pines was drafted into the Navy to serve in WWII. After two years of service, inspired by previous mentorship he had received from J. Robert Oppenheimer, he transferred to Princeton and completed his PhD there.

On at least three occasions, Pines collaborated on projects that later won their researchers the Nobel Prize in Physics, but by happenstance he was either involved too early on in the project, or he was the fourth collaborator in the group, which left him out of the running every time (a Nobel cannot be shared more than thrice).

Jörg Schmalian | April, 1965 –  | c.f. Chapter 88
In the late 1980s, Schmalian spent one summer working in construction in Russia on a Soviet factory near the Ural Mountains. He received a commendation for his excellent work in a formal ceremony commemorating the commissioned factory, the first-ever public recognition of his work. What was that work? Brick-laying for the factory bathrooms. 

His favorite pasttimes include road-biking and hiking in the Black Forest in Southwest Germany, and rowing on the river Rhine.

Branko Stojkovic | 1967 – | c.f. Chapter 88
Stojkovic attended gymnasium in Belgrade in his native Serbia before moving to the United States for college.

He is a strong swimmer, a fan of Aretha Franklin, and has channeled his physics degrees into success as a professional in the financial sector.

Peter Guy Wolynes | April 21, 1953 –  | c.f. Chapter 88
Wolynes has likened newly made protein molecules to strings of spaghetti, splattering all over the place. 

He has conducted extensive research into the architecture and function of genomes, including the reproduction of exact physical traits among family members. Once, among family heirlooms, he found a framed photograph of a woman in her twenties who looked exactly like his daughter, only to find that it was actually his grandmother. He hung the photograph on his wall.

Protein structure–prediction software that Wolynes pioneered bears the name AWSEM-MD as an homage to a quip from a student who, seeing the software’s full name, created the acronym AWSEM from its title. When the student said this was a joke, Wolynes decided it should be more than a joke, and the name stuck.

Elinor Claire Ostrom | Aug. 7, 1933 – June 12, 2012 | c.f. Chapter 89
Growing up after the Great Depression and during WWII, Ostrom witnessed scarcity on major and local levels, including the water wars over Los Angeles–area pumping rights, happening right in her backyard. When she was assigned to a research team looking at groundwater basins in the area, she was impressed by one basin whose jurisdictions found a way to cooperate effectively, leading to the subject of her dissertation and the themes of her life’s work.

When Ostrom won her Nobel, shared with Oliver E. Williamson, many economists were not yet familiar with her work and assumed that the award had actually gone to economist Bengt Holmstrom. 

Ostrom’s high school did not allow her to take trigonometry. As a result, Ostrom could not enroll in UCLA’s economics programs, and received all her degrees in political science instead. She is one of only three women to have won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, and one of only a handful of laureates to have done so with degree backgrounds from outside the field.