Emergence, nonlinear dynamics, power laws, networks, and agent-based modeling.
- Complexity: A Guided Tour - Melanie Mitchell. Best general introduction. Covers all the key ideas accessibly.
- Thinking in Systems - Donella Meadows. Systems thinking for everyone. Short and brilliant.
- Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos - Steven Strogatz. Synchronization across biology, physics, and society.
- Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos - Steven Strogatz. The standard textbook. Beautifully written with great exercises.
- Chaos: Making a New Science - James Gleick. The history and ideas of chaos theory for a general audience.
- Dynamics and Bifurcations - Hale & Koçak. More rigorous treatment.
- Linked: How Everything Is Connected - Albert-László Barabási. Scale-free networks for a general audience.
- Networks, Crowds, and Markets - Easley & Kleinberg. Free online. Bridges networks, game theory, and markets.
- Network Science - Barabási. Free online. The textbook.
- Why Stock Markets Crash - Didier Sornette. Critical phenomena in financial markets.
- Critical Mass - Philip Ball. Physics of society.
- The Black Swan - Nassim Taleb. Extreme events and our failure to predict them.
- Scale - Geoffrey West. Scaling laws in biology, cities, and companies.
- Growing Artificial Societies - Epstein & Axtell. The Sugarscape model and bottom-up social science.
- Agent-Based and Individual-Based Modeling - Railsback & Grimm. Practical introduction with NetLogo.
- Dynamics of Complex Systems - Yaneer Bar-Yam. Free online. Comprehensive and rigorous.
- At Home in the Universe - Stuart Kauffman. Self-organization and the origin of order in biology.
- The Origins of Order - Stuart Kauffman. The technical version. Dense but rewarding.
- Information, Physics, and Computation - Mézard & Montanari. Statistical physics meets CS.
- More is Different - P.W. Anderson (1972). Emergence and why reductionism has limits.
- Self-Organized Criticality - Bak, Tang, Wiesenfeld (1987). Sandpiles and power laws.
- Collective Dynamics of Small-World Networks - Watts & Strogatz (1998). Small-world networks.
- Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks - Barabási & Albert (1999). Preferential attachment and scale-free networks.
- Flocking: A Simple Model - Craig Reynolds. Emergent flocking from simple rules.
- An Introduction to Agent-Based Modeling - Wilensky & Rand. Survey of the field.
- Power Laws, Pareto Distributions and Zipf's Law - Newman (2005). When are power laws real?
- Catastrophic Cascade of Failures in Interdependent Networks - Buldyrev et al. (2010). Cascading failures.
- Santa Fe Institute Working Papers - Ongoing research from the home of complexity science.
- Complexity Explorer - Free courses from SFI.
- Santa Fe Institute: Introduction to Complexity - Free. The best starting point.
- Santa Fe Institute: Nonlinear Dynamics - Free.
- MIT 18.03: Differential Equations - Prerequisite for dynamical systems.
- Stanford CS224W: Machine Learning with Graphs - Network analysis and graph neural networks.
- Steven Strogatz's Nonlinear Dynamics Lectures (Cornell) - Strogatz's own lecture series accompanying his textbook. Some of the best science lectures on YouTube.
- Complexity and the Economy - W. Brian Arthur - Collected essays by the pioneer of complexity economics at Santa Fe, on increasing returns, path dependence, and agent-based models.
- An Introduction to Agent-Based Modeling - Wilensky & Rand - Comprehensive ABM textbook using NetLogo covering emergence, self-organization, and applications across disciplines.
- Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity - John Holland - Holland's accessible introduction to complex adaptive systems, genetic algorithms, and emergent order.
- Economics: Market crashes, herding behavior, complex adaptive markets
- Biology: Ecosystems, evolution, gene regulatory networks
- Fat tails: Power laws, extreme events, self-organized criticality
- Distributed systems: Emergent behavior, cascading failures, network resilience