Leigh Tesfatsion gave a colloquium talk at McMaster yesterday on the use of agent-based models (ABM) as the right mathematics for the social sciences.
I met Leigh in May 2009, during a Perimeter Institute workshop on the The Economic Crises and Its Implications for The Science of Economics. Of all the ambitious ideas put forward during the workshop (including things like gauge theory and economic preferences, evolutionary biology foundations for behavioral finance, and even something called 'particle economics'), her presentation on Agent-Based Computational Economics (ACE) struck me as the most promising way to achieve real progress in the understanding of economic crisis.
Since then, I have started my own little ABM project related to systemic risk in banking networks, so it was a great pleasure to host Leigh for a day and discuss future research avenues, not to mention that her talk was every bit as inspiring as the one she delivered at PI last year.
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