Eddie Lee

Eddie Lee studies the role of information in the small and large living patterns around us. Examples range from the biology of neural tissue to the ecology of forests, the dynamics of armed conflict, and the processes of innovation and obsolescence in society. He is fascinated by how we paint those patterns on the shared canvas of mathematics and what the resulting similarities between the mathematical representations reveal about them. Do similarities reflect analogous function, universal dynamics, or are they (simply) artifacts of our representation? His work aims to answer these overarching questions that come together from the standpoint of information.

He is an Austrian Science Fund ESPRIT Fellow at the Complexity Science Hub and formerly a Program Postdoctoral Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. He has a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Cornell University — where he received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship — and a BA in Physics from Princeton University. He has been invited to panels on the science of violence (Santa Fe Council on Int’l Relations) and on the physics of the 2021 Nobel Prize (Santa Fe Institute).