Four Ways of Thinking: A Journey into Human Complexity

Acclaimed mathematician David Sumpter shares practical and insightful solutions for navigating the chaos and complexity of our lives

What is the best way to think about the world? How often do we consider how our own thinking might impact the way we approach our daily decisions? Could it help or hinder our relationships, our careers, or even our health?

As acclaimed mathematician David Sumpter shows, thinking about thinking is something we rarely do, yet it is something science questions all the time. He has spent decades studying what we could all learn from the mindsets of scientists, and Four Ways of Thinking is the result. Here he reveals the four easily applied approaches to our problems: statistical, interactive, chaotic, and complex. Combining engaging personal experience with practical advice and inspiring tales of groundbreaking scientific pioneers (with a tiny bit of number crunching along the way), Sumpter shows how these tried and tested methods can help us with every conundrum, from how to bicker less with our partners to pitching to a tough crowd―and in doing so, change our lives.

David Sumpter is professor of applied mathematics at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, where he runs the Collective Behaviour Research Group. Originally from London, he studied his PhD in Mathematics at Manchester and held academic research positions at both Oxford and Cambridge before heading to Sweden, where he lives with his wife and two children. In his spare time, he trains a successful 9-year old boys' football team, Uppsala IF 2005.

An incomplete list of the applied maths research projects on which David has worked includes pigeons flying in pairs over Oxford; clapping undergraduate students in the north of England; the traffic of Cuban leaf-cutter ants; fish swimming between coral in the Great Barrier Reef; swarms of locusts traveling across the Sahara; disease-spread in Ugandan villages; the gaze of London commuters; dancing honey bees from Sydney; and the tubular structures built by Japanese slime moulds. His research has appeared in Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Proceedings of the Royal Society, among many others.