To access and begin to address such questions, theoretical investigations are often best carried out in close collaboration with researchers working on a variety of real systems.

This is a common theme within the Centre; much of the research exploits the richness of real-world data sets in order to study fundamental questions in complexity science. Many projects undertaken are collaborative in nature, and a diverse range of research is currently being undertaken within this framework, including:

• applying evolutionary dynamics to study economics and finance
• exploiting ideas from statistical mechanics to analyse the dynamics and structuring of social insects
• applying themes from self-organised criticality to analyse heart arrhythmia
• employing field theoretic methods to improve our understanding of the statistical mechanics of complex systems

Ultimately, the focus is on maintaining a diverse set of research themes within the Centre which allow for extensive insight into real-world data, and the opportunity to identify commonalities of theoretical and practical importance to fundamental complexity science.

In our image at the top of the page, the branches represent the connections between individual parts of a complex system. The buds and flowers represent the emergence of large-scale phenomena out of the interactions between microscopic parts. The beauty of the image mirrors the way we see the world as we strive to capture that wonder in our work.