Out of Context: On Complexity (Definitions)

"The complexity of a system is no guarantee of its accuracy." (John P Jordan, "Cost accounting; principles and practice", 1920)

"The central task of a natural science is to make the wonderful commonplace: to show that complexity, correctly viewed, is only a mask for simplicity; to find pattern hidden in apparent chaos." (Herbert A. Simon, "The Sciences of the Artificial", 1968)

"Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths." (John K Galbraith, "The Age of Uncertainty", 1977)

"Complexity is the label we will give to the existence of many interdependent variables in a given system. [...] Complexity is not an objective factor but a subjective one." (Dietrich Dorner, "The Logic of Failure: Recognizing and Avoiding Error in Complex Situations", 1989)

"Crude complexity is ‘the length of the shortest message that will describe a system, at a given level of coarse graining, to someone at a distance, employing language, knowledge, and understanding that both parties share (and know they share) beforehand." (Murray Gell-Mann, "What is Complexity?" Complexity Vol. 1 (1), 1995)

"Complexity is that property of a model which makes it difficult to formulate its overall behaviour in a given language, even when given reasonably complete information about its atomic components and their inter-relations." (Bruce Edmonds, "Syntactic Measures of Complexity", 1999)

"Complexity is looking at interacting elements and asking how they form patterns and how the patterns unfold. It’s important to point out that the patterns may never be finished." (W Brian Arthur, "Coming from Your Inner Self", 1999)

"Falling between order and chaos, the moment of complexity is the point at which self-organizing systems emerge to create new patterns of coherence and structures of behaviour." (Mark C Taylor, "The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture", 2001)

"Complexity is the characteristic property of complicated systems we don’t understand immediately. It is the amount of difficulties we face while trying to understand it." (Jochen Fromm, The Emergence of Complexity, 2004)

"The ultimate complexity is just another entropy." (Douglas Rushkoff, "Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now", 2004)

"Complexity is the prodigy of the world. Simplicity is the sensation of the universe. Behind complexity, there is always simplicity to be revealed. Inside simplicity, there is always complexity to be discovered." (Gang Yu, "in Data Warehousing in the Age of Big Data", 2013)