Complexity Researchers Help Visualize the Spread of Western Thought

We know well enough that ideas travel over time, sometimes following general human migration routes and their associated promises of financial support, but sometimes not. The overall spread culture is more granular and dynamic than one might first imagine: sometimes it follows an arrow-straight line across a frontier, and other times it settles on some location (Hollywood, say) like flies on a piece of fruit. Thanks to researchers at the University of Miami and Google's Freebase database of well-known people (places, and things), we have the visualization below, which takes these notable figures and reduces them to data points simply representing relative locations of birth and death.

The map animation, described in this week's edition of Science, reconstructs, "aggregate intellectual mobility over two millennia through the birth and death locations of more than 150,000 notable individuals," the paper explains. "The tools of network and complexity theory were then used to identify characteristic statistical patterns and determine the cultural and historical relevance of deviations." With thinkers often landing in relatively out-of-the-way locales, such as small towns in the Alps or along the French Riveria, the results aren't always what one might expect in a capitalistic description of the world: ideas don't always follow money.

"The resulting network of locations provides a macroscopic perspective of cultural history, which helps us retrace cultural narratives of Europe and North America using large-scale visualization and quantitative dynamical tools, and to derive historical trends of cultural centers beyond the scope of specific events, or narrow time intervals," said physicist Chaoming Song in a U of Miami statement.

"There is an increasing realization that systems across different disciplines often share similar structural and dynamic properties," Song continued. "Such similarities offer new perspectives and unique opportunities for physicists to apply their methodologies on a much broader set of phenomena." No genius can escape statistics.