Gintropy: A Fiction on Inequality

Authors

Tamás Sándor Biró
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6188-8478
DOI: https://doi.org/10.70487/978-615-6809-01-8

Keywords:

physics, mathematics, statistics, fiction, novel

Synopsis

This book is an experiment in the genre of textbooks: mathematical formulas related to entropy, distributions, and inequality measures like the Gini index are embedded into a fictious story about seven scientists, meeting, and acting according to their respective characters in an imaginary project. The embedding of formulas inside the story is, however, lifted by putting all formulas into the last chapter, so that the story can be read through. This is done for the sake of those who would not or could not follow university level math.

Still, as a novelty, the pdf file contains hypertext jumps to and back from the corresponding formulas. In the printed version, unfortunately, only the page number could have been indicated where to continue (or not) the reading.

The story is about (economical, wealth and social) inequality, and about the utopistic and distopic dream of treating equally persons with varying social and economical status. The mathematical models and notions behind are introductory to the area of statistics, statistical pyhsics, econophysics and quantitaive finance.

This book, as a novel mixture of a fiction and a theoretical textbook, may prove to be a chimera, but perhaps also a new dynamit for the intellectual considerations about how to measure, model and manipulate inequality in our societies. As said, an experiment.

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Chapters

  • Chapter 1. Seven scientists
    Tamás Sándor Biró
  • Chapter 2. Stories and Histories
    Tamás Sándor Biró
  • Chapter 3. Information Investigation
    Tamás Sándor Biró
  • Chapter 4. Alternate Formulas, Alternate Realities
    Tamás Sándor Biró
  • Chapter 5. Imagine, No Atoms
    Tamás Sándor Biró
  • Chapter 6. Is it Common to be Rich?
    Tamás Sándor Biró
  • Chapter 7. Inequality measures Complexity
    Tamás Sándor Biró
  • Formal background
    Tamás Sándor Biró

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Author Biography

Tamás Sándor Biró

Tamás Biró received the master’s degree in Physics and Biophysics in 1980 and the Ph.D. in 1982 from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. He worked on theoretical heavy ion physics, in particular on strange quark production in quark-gluon plasma at the KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics in Budapest; then, he continued, as researcher, at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, at the GSI Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt and at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Giessen.

Returning to Budapest in 1994, he has been Vice Director of the Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics at the Wigner Research Centre for Physics from 2013 to 2019. He invented the color rope model for describing the early phase of ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions in 1983, took part in studies of chaotic dynamics in strongly interacting non-abelian gauge fields (1991–2004), and then he developed a fable for statistical physics of complex systems and non-extensive thermodynamics.

Now he leads a nanoplasmonic fusion experiment, NAPLIFE, at the Wigner RCP (2020-2025). He collaborated among others with colleagues at Duke University in North Carolina, USA, at Bergen University in Norway, at the Universities of Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa, at the Central China Normal University in Wuhan, China, at the Yukawa Institute in Kyoto, Japan, at the UBB Cluj, Romania, and at TU Wien, Austria. He is external faculty at the Complexity Science Hub, in Vienna. He edited the Acta Physica Hungarica and was Editor in Chief of EPJ A (Hadrons and Nuclei).

Gintropy cover

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Gintropy

Published

2024 September 30

Series

All Colors of Physics: Sokszínű fizika

Print ISSN

3057-8477
Copyright (c) 2024 HUN-REN Wigner Research Centre for Physics

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Details about the available publication format: Gintropy

Gintropy

ISBN-13 (15)

978-615-6809-01-8

Details about the available publication format: Gintropy

Gintropy

ISBN-13 (15)

978-615-6809-00-1

Date of first publication (11)

2024-09-30
Hijri Calendar

Physical Dimensions

176mm x 250mm x 10mm