University seminar "Horizons of Science Disciplines", October 16, 2025
The Center for Advanced Studies at Warsaw University of Technology invites you to the university-wide scientific seminar Horizons of Scientific Disciplines .
The seminar aims to present the achievements of teams representing specific scientific disciplines at Warsaw University of Technology. The planned meeting, devoted to the physical sciences and titled " Can Physics Explain Social Phenomena? ", will feature presentations by Prof. Janusz Hołyst , PhD, DSc, Eng., Julian Sienkiewicz, PhD, DSc, Eng. , from the Faculty of Physics at Warsaw University of Technology, and Prof. Katarzyna Sznajd-Weron, PhD, DSc, Eng., from the Faculty of Management at Wrocław University of Science and Technology. The moderator will be Dr. Marcin Koszowy, a university professor from the Faculty of Administration and Social Sciences at Warsaw University of Technology.
Russia's military aggression against Ukraine in February 2022 revealed the fallacy of our belief in the stability of the global political system. This belief stemmed largely from the short time horizon of our observations and the naive expectation that the political structures and social relations around us were fixed points in the evolution of history. In reality, however, there is no basis for assuming that the socio-political order we know is the only possible solution, and that evolution towards new structures must be continuous. The lecture will present three agent-based models in which changes in socio-political structures are discontinuous: (i) a model of social influence with a strong leader, (ii) a model of interaction between competing social groups, and (iii) a model of structural equilibrium. Discontinuous changes result from the multistability of multi-agent models, and the observed transitions are irreversible and exhibit hysteresis. All analyzed transitions correspond to critical points derived from fold catastrophe theory, and the critical parameter values calculated using analytical methods agree well with the results of numerical simulations. The dynamics of these models will be illustrated using computer animations.
The online meeting will take place on October 16, 2025, at 4:15 p.m. on the TEAMS platform .
Link to the meeting: seminar.
If you have any additional questions, please contact us at hdn.csz[at]pw.edu.pl
We invite all interested parties to participate in the seminar.