Prof. Boghosian holds adjunct positions in Computer Science and Physics. Prof. Boghosian was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2010, a foreign member of the Armenian National Academy of Sciences in 2008, and received Tufts University's Distinguished Scholar Award in 2010. From 2010 to 2014, Prof. Boghosian served as President of the American University of Armenia. Prof. Boghosian's research interests center on applied dynamical systems, including kinetic theory and agent-based modeling.

At microscopic scales of length and time, a gas is comprised of molecules colliding and exchanging energy. The manner in which they do so results in a particular distribution of energies that has been understood for nearly 150 years. At macroscopic length and time scales, the gas behaves as a fluid, with all the turbulence, chaos and complexity that is evident in a satellite picture of a hurricane.

At the microscopic level of description, an economy consists of economic agents, transacting and exchanging wealth. This results in a particular distribution of wealth, the precise nature of which is a subject of active research in macroeconomics. At macroscopic scales, this presumably results in all the turbulence and complex collective behavior of markets and market economies.

The juxtaposition of the above viewpoints is more than just an idle metaphor. In recent years, modeling methods from statistical physics have been imported into economics for the analysis of wealth distribution, with considerable success and unprecedented accuracy. This has made possible the precise quantification and prediction of other quantities of interest to macroeconomists, such as upward mobility, persistence of wealth, and the degree to which a society is oligarchical.

This talk will focus on wealth distribution, and the impact that this remarkable technology transfer from physics to the social sciences is likely to have on economics, political discourse, ethics, and public attitudes in the years ahead. There is good reason to believe that the public servants of the future will make decisions informed by models that originated in statistical physics.