I’m a theoretical physicist and complex-systems researcher based in Amsterdam. I am currently a methodologist at Statistics Netherlands (CBS) and postdoctoral research fellow at the Dutch Institute for Emergent Phenomena (DIEP) and the Institute of Physics at the University of Amsterdam and the Department of Mathematics at the VU.
My work develops physics-inspired numerical methods for complex systems with applications to society, economy and official statistics. I have worked on using tensor-network representations to approximate large probability distributions efficiently, with applications to topics such as epidemic models (including large deviations), cellular automata, and evolutionary game theory. At the moment, I am interested in continuum limits of socioeconomic agent-based models, resulting in a hydrodynamics of social and economic activity. We are using these models to connect to spatial patterns present in demographic data available at Statistics Netherlands
More broadly, my research and teaching revolve around emergence: how collective, macroscopic behavior arises from interacting components. At DIEP, I organize a weekly seminar series on emergence, featuring speakers from across the natural and social sciences. I’m interested in developing methods that are not only mathematically sound, but also transferable and useful in real-world modelling contexts.
For a full list of publications, see my Google Scholar
Wout Merbis 