Professor Hector Zenil

Hector Zenil, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor and Co-director at the Information Dynamics Lab, Center for Molecular Medicine, Karolinska Institute (the institution that awards the Nobel prize), Stockholm, Sweden; Senior Researcher and PI (Faculty Member), Computational Structural Biology Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, UK; Head of Group, Algorithmic Nature Group, LABORES, Paris, France; and Senior Research Associate, Special Projects (office of the CEO, S. Wolfram), Wolfram Research, Illinois, USA. He is also the Editor of the Complex Systems journal.
 
With backgrounds in math, computer science, philosophy and epistemology, Hector is a “computational natural scientist”. (Greg Chaitin described him as a “new kind of practical theoretician”.)
 
Hector introduced novel approaches to approximate and apply non-computable functions that exploit and unleash the full power of universal measures of complexity, that is, measures that characterize the properties of an object independent of the ways in which such an object is described.
 
Equipped with such powerful measures, Hector aims to tackle fundamental challenges in science, in particular the challenge of causal discovery to unveil design principles and generating mechanisms of dynamic systems. The range of application of his work is thus very general and aims to design effective intervention tools to steer the causal content and fate of artificial and natural complex systems.
 
He also has interests in spatial computing, in the trade-offs between, and the interplay of, complexity measures; and in topics at the intersection of computation and philosophy, such as simulation, reality and fine-tuning, all of which he pursues by performing actual numerical experiments with computer programs as possible models of the world.
 
His publications include A Computable Universe: Understanding and Exploring Nature as Computation (with a foreword by Sir Roger Penrose), Irreducibility and Computational Equivalence: 10 Years After Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science, Randomness Through Computation: Some Answers, More Questions, Sistemas Complejos Como Modelos de Computacion (Spanish Edition), and Seminars in Cell & Developmental Biology. He also authored Lo Que Cabe En El Espacio: Develando las propiedades geométricas de nuestra realidad (Spanish Edition) which is also available for free in MOBI and PDF formats.
 
Hector earned his BS in Mathematics at the National University of Mexico (UNAM) in 2004. He attended Brown University, Wolfram Science School, Computational Sciences in 2005. His participation was graded as “brilliant” by Dr. Stephen Wolfram, the same year he was hired by Stephen as Research Fellow and consultant to his office (CEO); 2 years later he became Senior Research Associate. He earned his Master in Logic at University of Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne), École Nationale Supérieure Ulm & CNRS in 2006. He earned his Ph.D. in Theoretical Computer Science at University of Lille I in 2011. He earned his second Ph.D. in Philosophy and Epistemology, Mathematics at University of Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne), École Nationale Supérieure Ulm & CNRS in 2015.
 
Read his Google Scholar Citations and his LinkedIn profile. Follow his Twitter feed. Read his blog.