Research Outputs
I aim to make all my work freely available to the public. I keep a complete local archive of papers and talks (which may be WordPress-ified soon). Sometimes, double-blind refereeing means that papers are not listed until they have been accepted formally.
- Up-to-date list of publications with abstracts and links, generated by BibBase.org (a few MathJax issues mean some LaTeX symbols are garbled currently; some non-research articles – mostly on publication reform – are included)
- Supporting data and code for papers at Harvard Dataverse
- Local archive of slides of research talks
- Short (approx. 1 minute) summaries of recent papers on my Youtube channel
- Google Scholar profile
- My MathSciNet author number is 356004 and my official reviewer name is Mark Curtis Wilson. My official name on all but one published paper is Mark C. Wilson.
Currently very active projects
- Order symmetry in mechanism design (with Geoffrey Pritchard, Rupert Freeman)
- Second edition of monograph Analytic Combinatorics (with Robin Pemantle, Stephen Melczer)
- Correlates of cooperation (with Fatemeh Ghaffari, David Rand, Antonio Arechar)
- Science of science (with Fatemeh Ghaffari)
- Asymptotics of algebraic generating functions (with Torin Greenwood, Stephen Melczer, Tia Ruza)
I have many semi-dormant projects that I hope to get to soon!
Research History and interests
My PhD thesis was in abstract algebra, but in 1999 I switched to the area I am best known for, the asymptotics of multivariate generating functions (with occasional forays into other areas of combinatorics). Since around 2004 I have also been interested social science applications. I have worked in (computational) social choice theory. I am also interested in the systematic design of electoral systems. More recently I started working on network science, including diffusion and learning in social networks, citation networks, and network balance. I am part of 6-person NSF project (under the Harnessing the Data Revolution program) to study the relation between brain structure (connectomes), individual behavior, and group behavior.
Research Philosophy and Practice
I see myself more as a theorizer than a problem-solver, although perhaps the picture is not as extreme as painted by Gian-Carlo Rota. I strongly believe in trying to find general, algorithmic, principled solutions to problems, and implementing them when possible. I believe in using axioms to organize areas of study, but am critical of the overuse of the axiomatic method. My research methods are a mixture of axiomatic approaches, computer simulation, efficient algorithms, network science and data science.