Scale law in physics, biology, society and beyond
일시 : 2026-06-10 16:00 ~
연사 : 윤혜진 (서울대학교 경영대학)
담당 : Prof. Sunghoon Jung, Prof. Joonho Jang, Prof. Yongjoo Baek
장소 : 56동105호
We will discuss universality in the scaling laws of biology and cities. The universality and self-similarity observed across urban phenomena seem at once trivial and non-trivial. On the one hand, cities are so complex that it seems almost impossible to explain them through simple principles. Urban characteristics, geographic conditions, institutional arrangements, and historical trajectories are deeply entangled. Even carefully designed plans often produce unintended consequences. From this perspective, it is striking that universal and self-similar patterns appear across so many urban properties, including population distribution, crime, productivity, infrastructure, and economic diversity (Zipf's law, scaling law and fractal structure). Such regularities suggest that, despite complexity, the underlying dynamics may be reducible to a simpler and more general structure. On the other hand, especially to physicists, universality may be a natural, even expected, consequence of the common functions cities perform. People move to cities for interaction, opportunity, productivity, infrastructure, and growth. Cities, in turn, concentrate social and economic activity in ways that generate technological advances and economic development.Basically, cities are made of people; people are made of cells; cells are made of atoms and molecules. So, it may not be too surprising that cities exhibit such statistical regularities that can be understood through a scaling framework. This theoretical question remains unresolved. In this seminar, we will, instead, examine the empirical phenomena, the competing interpretations, and the conjectures that connect biological and urban scaling.