When I was a teenager, the 1980s felt like a decade of disasters. We watched a terrible human cost being paid live on TV in a series of football-related disasters.
I saw bodies stretchered away on advertising hoardings at Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield, the back-and-forth terrace skirmishes at Heysel in Brussels that prefaced a fatal crush, a man walking calmly out of the burning stand at Bradford, his entire body ablaze. Crowd catastrophes dominated my youth.
Much of my work as a computer scientist has focused on modelling complex systems made up of many interacting components. These may be DNA molecules, bacteria in a dish, social insects, or even people.
