Educational Goals
Several methodologies, born in the context of the physical sciences (and particularly in theoretical physics), can be usefully applied even to areas of research apparently far away, starting from economics to get to the humanities and social sciences. The course offers a survey of the state of the art in this field and offers an introduction to the potential and techniques of these new tools of investigation.
Description
Qualitative and quantitative analysis. Mathematical models and their use.
Some elementary notions of statistics: theory of error interpolation and extrapolation, reliability of estimates.
The use of tables and graphs: representations of social phenomena in the Cartesian plane, scaling laws (Pareto, Zipf) and their representation.
Self-organized criticality: theory of scale-free systems and applications to network theory and other social phenomena.
Universality of the laws for scale-free systems: some meaningful examples.
The distribution of surnames: models and their application, link with genetics and linguistics.
Systems with scale: general principles, analysis of the cognitive space in literary and historical texts; the university recruiting system.
Methods of experimental physics: physics for cultural heritage and archeometry.
The supervised development of term papers and their presentation and discussion will be part of the course.