Mark Buchanan is a physicist and science writer and the author of Ubiquity, Nexus Small Worlds and the New Science of Networks, The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You, and Forecast: What Extreme Weather Can Tell us About Economics. In all of these books, Mark explores the potential for ideas from the modern physical sciences to help us understand human social systems.
A former editor of both the international science journal Nature, and the more popular science magazine New Scientist, he has written articles for those publications as well as for magazines in the US and the UK, including Science, Wired, the New York Times, the Independent (London), the Harvard Business Review and Technology Review. He currently writes a monthly column for Bloomberg News. He has been following physicists’ efforts to model economic and financial systems for over a decade and has written many articles on how physics can inform an approach to economics and finance.
Nexus, published by W. W. Norton, has been translated into eleven languages. It was short-listed for the Aventis Science Writing Prize. The Social Atom was published by Bloomsbury. Booklist wrote, “Packed with intriguing examples … the book challenges us to reappraise everything we think we know about why we do the things we do.” Bloomsbury also published Forecast. Kirkus praised the book for its “stimulating deconstruction of contemporary economic theory.”