Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist and pioneer in the field of complexity science – the science of systems and networks. The physicist is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute, of which he was president from 2005 to 2009. He is one of only around ten Senior Fellows at the Los Alamos National Library. The complexity researcher is known for his investigations into the origins of scaling laws in biology, from the cell to organisms and their metabolism to ecosystems, which he has extended to organizations, companies, the economy and cities. He thus discovered the simple mathematical law that governs the properties of cities and shows that many aspects of a city can be derived from the size of its population and how similar the laws of organisms and companies are. He has received numerous internationally renowned prizes for his research. In 2006, Time magazine ranked him among the 100 most influential people in the world.