Lewis Cole 2020

Hello, and welcome to my new blog. I have never written a blog before and so this is likely to be a bit of a work in progress slowly evolving in time.

Within this blog I aim to talk about some ideas that are of interest to me. My interests are quite broad and so there will likely be a wide variety of topics discussed. I suppose most, if not all, of these interests could be placed under the broad umbrella of “models” or “simulation”. Some particular areas or topics I wish to write about include:

  • Non-linear dynamics
  • Systems out of equilibrium
  • Fat-tail and extreme value statistics
  • Non-ergodicity
  • Path dependence
  • Individual vs Collective phenomena
  • Agent based modelling
  • Networks
  • Machine Learning / Data Analysis
  • Mathematics, Probability, Computer Science generally
  • Inter-disciplinary study

Many of these areas could be considered “complex” or “complex systems” although I am not a big fan of the term due to lack of a consistent definition. In many cases we must rely on computational methods since traditional analytic methods tend to fall down. As a result most blog posts will contain sample code, I will write this in Python (with a variety of libraries/packages) owing to ease of understanding and it’s ubiquity. As such I will also write about more computational considerations such as:

  • Python packages
  • Other languages
  • Writing performant python
  • Optimization techniques
  • and so on

From time to time I might also include more “thought pieces” on news/recent research or book reviews or similar.

Where applicable I will try and assume no specific knowledge of a particular subject and try and build up to a somewhat sophisticated level of understanding. However I will be forced to assume a certain level of mathematical/statistical/programming understanding as I would rather not write articles on the fundamentals, where possible I will try and mention the name of techniques used so if they appear unfamiliar it will at least be possible to search for resources online.

To create this blog I used the fast.ai fastpages which has made the job much easier. I have a great deal of gratitude to Jeremy Howard, Hamel Husain and the folks at fast.ai for making this simple as possible so I can focus on creating content instead of worrying about the technicalities of creating the blog.

Thank you for your time, I hope you enjoy my blog posts.

If you would like to get in contact with me you can via my twitter account or via this blog’s email: email