Achievement

Many of our IGERT trainees including Andrea Jones-Rooy, Aaron Bramson, Russell Golman, Jon Zelner and others have helped construct models of diversity for an interdisciplinary project on the science of diversity. Scott Page has a book called Diversity and Complexity to be published by Princeton University Press in Fall 2010 that summarizes much of this research. Among the main results presented in the book are

- a finding that many empirical results that show the benefits of diversity may be evidence of diminishing returns to scale and not just synergies

- a finding that diversity can be beneficial through averaging and diminishing returns even when the direct effect of diversity is quite negative

- a finding that replicator dynamics alone are not sufficient to support the intermediate disturbance hypothesis -- the claim that moderate levels of disturbances maintain diversity.