Willem Nielsen

Willem Nielsen is a researcher in complex systems and theoretical biology at the Wolfram Institute. He specializes in building models to study phenomena from the life and social sciences. At the institute he has contributed to the effort towards building computational foundations for medicine, the project to formulate a theory of innovation, and published work using Wolfram’s new cellular-automata model of evolution to model social hierarchies in biology. He is actively working on projects to extend Stephen Wolfram’s recent models of adapted systems in and beyond the life sciences as well as test them against ideas from the existing literature. He is relentlessly passionate about extending the foundations of science and a firm believer in the Wolfram approach.

Research Interests

Computational Biology
Complex Systems
Computer Science

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What Can We Learn about Engineering and Innovation from Half a Century of the Game of Life Cellular Automaton?

Stephen Wolfram

Things are invented. Things are discovered. And somehow there’s an arc of progress that’s formed. But are there what amount to “laws of innovation” that govern that arc of progress?

There are some exponential and other laws that purport to at least measure overall quantitative aspects of progress (number of transistors on a chip; number of papers published in a year; etc.). But what about all the disparate innovations that make up the arc of progress? Do we have a systematic way to study those?

Willem Nielsen

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