[[Murray Gell-Mann]] (1929–2019) was an American physicist, winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize for his classification of elementary particles — among them the **quark**, a name he took from a line of Joyce. Complexity was his second act. In 1984 he co-founded the [[Santa Fe Institute]] with [[George Cowan]], the first research centre devoted to the study of complex systems, and named the field's subject himself: he popularised the term **complex adaptive system**. His statement of the programme, *The Quark and the Jaguar* (1994), turns on a single question: how does the simple give rise to the complex, and how does the complex relate back to the simple? His answer ran through **effective complexity** — the information a system carries is greatest not at pure regularity (a crystal) nor at pure randomness (noise) but between the two, where patterns sit. It is the same regime [[Stuart Kauffman]] called the edge of chaos, arrived at from physics rather than biology. The relevance to the studio is his placement of interest: too much order and nothing new can appear; too much chaos and nothing persists. A painting is interesting in the middle — regular enough to hold, irregular enough to surprise. [Murray Gell-Mann (Wikipedia)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Gell-Mann) [The Quark and the Jaguar (Wikipedia)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quark_and_the_Jaguar) `Concepts:` [[Complexity Theory]] · [[Complex Adaptive Systems]] `Knowledge Base:`