30th October, 2020
SFI Complex Systems Summer School
Tipping points in nature and society
Kangaroo, Pandemic, BLM, Rainforest, Polar bear; Carpenter et al. (2019); Lenton et al. (2019); Otto et al. (2020)
A brief history
- Bifurcation theory studies how systems change qualitatively as parameters vary
- In the 1970s, René Thom developed catastrophe theory
- Describes how (low-dimensional) systems can change suddenly
- Popularized by Christopher Zeeman (1976), who applied it to everything