Scott Page

Scott Page is author of recently released The Difference: How The Power of Diversity Creates Betters Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. A professor of complex systems, political science, and economics at the University of Michigan and an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute, he is a popular teacher and public speaker on topics related to complexity and diversity. In addition to his academic duties, he serves as a consultant to the government on matters relating to terrorism (that's all he can say) and consults with Fortune 100 companies as well as federal agencies on diversity and modeling related issues.

He has been involved in educating citizens on the effects of racially
based referenda, such as Prop 187 in California and Prop 2 in Michigan. Recently, he served a leadership role in the University of Michigan's
Diversity Blueprints initiative, which proposed policies to help UM respond to Prop 2, which outlawed racial and gender based preferences.

Scott has been active in organizing academic and public conferences on
topic related to complex adaptive systems, diversity and robustness,
sports and complexity, diversity and performance, institutional design,
and mathematical and computational modeling. He also runs a summer
school on modeling at the Santa Fe Institute for graduate students
interested in learning more about complex systems.

Scott's first foray into web based reporting was incognito, as Orie Glen,
in the now defunct online sportszine, Sportsjones. As Orie Glen, he wrote articles on game theory and soccer and even predicted with uncanny accuracy how many steroid induced homers Mark McGwire would tally in 1998, landing him in several major newspapers.

In his spare time, Scott coaches soccer and basketball and helps raise
funds for his local Y's Strong Kids initiative.

At Michigan, Scott serves as associate director of the Center for the
Study of Complex Systems, on the steering committee of the National
Center for Institutional Diversity, on the executive board of the
Rackham Graduate School, and on various hiring and promotion
committees. Prior to coming to the University of Michigan, he was on
the faculties of the California Institute of Technology and of the
University of Iowa. He has also been a visiting professor at UCLA and
at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.

Scott currently lives in Ann Arbor, MI, with his lovely and talented wife
Jenna Bednar (a professor of political science at Michigan), their two
sons Orrie (7) and Cooper (5), their dog Zozo (11), and their cat
Rudder (25+). Next year he'll be in Palo Alto visiting the Center for
Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences.

Scott was born in rural Michigan in 1963 and attended the University of
Michigan (Go Blue!) as an undergraduate, where he served as student
body president. He received a masters degree in mathematics from
Wisconsin and a PhD in Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences at
Northwestern.