Mathematics is commonly referred to as the language of the universe, as its unique ability to describe and explain the physical, natural, and social worlds has only become clearer in recent decades. In the 21st century, the social world has transformed into a sociotechnical world, where interactions with technology mediate many (if not all) aspects of life, problematizing formerly effective methods of quantitative analysis, such as traditional statistics. The last few decades of research have shown that society is a sociotechnical complex system, so approaches based on reductionism and aggregation are both incomplete.

This course will impart knowledge of a suite of tools well-suited for modeling and analyzing sociotechnical complex systems. These include, as seen by the bird:

• matrixology (aka linear algebra)
• probability and Bayesian inference
• information theory
• Zipf’s law and rank-based statistics
• scaling laws and power-law distributions

all of which we will implement analytically and computationally with personalized coaching from Ben Emery.

This course will be asynchronous online, with lectures delivered via video and ongoing collaboration on problem sets via a custom course Slack. More information will populate here as the coach converges on more details.