John Boyd

Emeritus Professor of Anthropology (PhD: U of Michigan, 1967)
3139 Social Sciences Plaza A
(949) 824-7602
email: jpboyd at uci dot edu

Professor Boyd is interested in mathematical models of social behavior, ranging from kinship systems to informal social networks. The methodological questions raised by these endeavors have led him to use probabilistic methods (simulated annealing) to fit structures such as discrete semigroups to network data. Other areas of interest include sociobiology, neural networks, chaos theory, and C++ programming. What ties all these areas together is the emmergence of complex structures arising from simple interaction rules.

Selected Publications

Social Semigroups.
George Mason UP, 1991.

"Relational Homomorphisms."
Social Networks 14 (1992): 163-186.

Review of A "Representing Kinship," by F.E. Tjon Sie Fat.
(With C. Hirschman and T. Brazill.) Journal of Social Networks 16 (1994): 181-189.

"Relations, residuals, regular interiors, and relative regular equivalence."
(With W.H. Batchelder and E. Kumbasar.) Journal of Social Networks [Accepted November 1996]

"Culture as shared cognitive representations." (With A.K. Romney, C.C. Moore and W.H. Batchelder.) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 93.10 (1997): 4699-4705.