An Evening with Prof César A. Hidalgo in Cambridge

Join physicist, professor, and author César A. Hidalgo as he discusses his new book The Infinite Alphabet – a brilliant book which unravels the laws describing the growth and diffusion of knowledge by taking you from a failed attempt to build a city of knowledge in Ecuador to the growth of China’s innovation economy.

César A. Hidalgo, a world-renowned scholar for his work on economic complexity, will walk you through the “three laws” and the many principles that govern how knowledge grows, moves, and decays. By the end of this journey, you will understand why knowledge grows exponentially in the electronics industry and what mechanisms govern its diffusion across geographic borders, social networks, and professional boundaries.

César A. Hidalgo is a physicist, professor, and author known for pioneering work in economic complexity, data visualization, and applied artificial intelligence. For nine years he led MIT’s Collective Learning Group before moving to France to found the Center for Collective Learning (CCL), an international research laboratory with offices at the Toulouse School of Economics and Corvinus University of Budapest.

Author ofWhy Information Grows (Allen Lane, 2015) and co-author ofThe Atlas of Economic Complexity and How Humans Judge Machines(MIT, 2014, 2021), he was the sole recipient of the 2018 Lagrange Prize recognizing excellence and innovation in the study of complex systems. Hidalgo is the author of more than sixty peer-reviewed publications that have been cited by tens of thousands of studies. His TED talk on augmented democracy has been viewed over two million times.

Professor Dame Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. She co-directs the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, where she leads research on progress and productivity. Diane is also a member of the UK Government’s Industrial Strategy Council, New Towns Taskforce, and advises the Competition and Markets Authority. She is the author of the bestseller, “GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History”.