Geoffrey Brian West (born 15 December 1940) is a British theoretical physicist and former president and distinguished professor of the Santa Fe Institute. He is one of the leading scientists working on a scientific model of cities (see also, urban scaling). Among other things, his work states that with the doubling of a city's population, salaries per capita will generally increase by 15%.
Biography Born in Taunton, Somerset, a rural town in western England, West moved to London when he was 13. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics from the University of Cambridge and pursued graduate studies on the pion at Stanford University.
West became a Stanford faculty member before he joined the particle theory group at New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory. After Los Alamos, he became president of the Santa Fe Institute, where he worked and works on biological issues such as the allometric law and other power laws in biology.
West has since been honoured as one of Time magazine's Time 100.Time Magazine's article about West He is a member of the World Knowledge Dialogue Scientific Board.
See also Through the Wormhole#Season 3 (2012)
Selected publications Necia Grant Cooper, Geoffrey B. West (eds.) Particle Physics: A Los Alamos Primer. CUP Archive, 29 April 1988. Brown, James H., and Geoffrey B. West, eds. Scaling in biology. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Articles (selection)Geoffrey West publications in Google Scholar
West, Geoffrey B., James H. Brown, and Brian J. Enquist. "The fourth dimension of life: fractal geometry and allometric scaling of organisms." science 284.5420 (1999): 1677–1679. West, Geoffrey B., James H. Brown, and Brian J. Enquist. "A general model for the structure and allometry of plant vascular systems." Nature 400.6745 (1999): 664–667.
Bettencourt, L. M., Lobo, J., Helbing, D., Kühnert, C., & West, G. B. (2007). "Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities." Proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 104(17), 7301–7306. Scientific American often changes the title of a print article when it is published online. This article is titled "Big Data Needs a Big Theory to Go with It" online.
References
External links
"Yeah, but what about the crayfish?" – Article about West's scaling law work on PhysicsWorld.com Scaling Laws In Biology And Other Complex Systems – Talk he gave at Google
The surprising math of cities and corporations – TED Talk "New York Times" article about West's work on biological scaling New York Times article about West's work on cities