Related papers: Editorial: Statistical Mechanics and Social Scienc…
We review an emerging body of work by physicists addressing questions of economic organization and function. We suggest that, beyond simply employing models familiar from physics to economic observables, remarkable regularities in economic…
Within the continuous endeavour of improving the efficiency and resilience of air transport, the trend of using concepts and metrics from statistical physics has recently gained momentum. This scientific discipline, which integrates…
With the possible exception of gambling, meteorology, particularly precipitation forecasting, may be the area with which the general public is most familiar with probabilistic assessments of uncertainty. Despite the heavy use of stochastic…
An account is given of the methods of working of Experimental High Energy Particle Physics, from the viewpoint of statisticians and others unfamiliar with the field. Current statistical problems, techniques, and hot topics are introduced…
Challenges due to the rapid urbanization of the world -- especially in emerging countries -- range from an increasing dependence on energy, to air pollution, socio-spatial inequalities, environmental and sustainability issues. Modelling the…
Opinion dynamics, the study of how individual beliefs and collective public opinion evolve, is a fertile domain for applying statistical physics to complex social phenomena. Like physical systems, societies exhibit macroscopic regularities…
Efficient networking has a substantial economic and societal impact in a broad range of areas including transportation systems, wired and wireless communications and a range of Internet applications. As transportation and communication…
Social physics is an active and diverse field in which many scientists with formal training in physics study a broad class of complex social phenomena. Social physics investigates societal problems but most often does not count on the…
Econophysics is a new area developed recently by the cooperation between economists, mathematicians and physicists. It's not a tool to predict future prices of stocks and exchange rates. It applies idea, method and models in Statistical…
The fluctuations in nonequilibrium systems are under intense theoretical and experimental investigation. Topical ``fluctuation relations'' describe symmetries of the statistical properties of certain observables, in a variety of models and…
Recent developments in the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics have brought the theory closer to that of classical probability and statistics. On the other hand, the unique character of quantum physics sets many of the questions…
Recently, it has been recognized that phase transitions play an important role in the probabilistic analysis of combinatorial optimization problems. However, there are in fact many other relations that lead to close ties between computer…
This review article is the second part of the project ``Selected Topics of Social Physics". The first part has been devoted to equilibrium systems. The present part considers nonequilibrium systems. The style of the paper combines the…
The application of classical methods of statistical mechanics, originally developed by Ludwig Boltzmann in gas dynamics, to the description of social phenomena is a successful story that we try to outline in this paper. On one hand, it is…
I give a highly selective overview of the way statistical mechanics explains the microscopic origins of the time asymmetric evolution of macroscopic systems towards equilibrium and of first order phase transitions in equilibrium. These…
We investigate the static and dynamic properties of a celebrated model of social segregation, providing a complete explanation of the mechanisms leading to segregation both in one- and two-dimensional systems. Standard statistical physics…
Mesoscopic systems in a slowly fluctuating environment are often well described by superstatistical models. We develop a generalized statistical mechanics formalism for superstatistical systems, by mapping the superstatistical complex…
Quantitative social science is not only about regression analysis or, in general, data inference. Computer simulations of social mechanisms have a 60-year long history. They have been used for many different purposes -- to test scenarios,…
This paper addresses issues related to the process of informal socialization into physics, particularly for senior graduate students and postdoctoral scholars. Many physicists' careers are built on the relationships they have and develop…
We survey a range of models of opinion exchange. From the introduction: "The exchange of opinions between individuals is a fundamental social interaction... Moreover, many models in this field are an excellent playground for mathematicians,…