About Peter Turchin
Welcome to Cliodynamica, Peter Turchin’s newsletter about our past, present, and possible futures as viewed through the lens of Cliodynamics.
Peter Turchin
I grew up in the Soviet Union—a country that doesn’t exist any more. When I was 20 years old, my family moved to America, because my father, a scientist and dissident, was expelled from the Soviet Union.
I began my academic career in the 1980s as an ecologist; I made my living studying the population dynamics of beetles, butterflies, mice, and deer. This was the time when animal ecology was revolutionized by the rapid growth in the processing power of computers. I always liked mathematics, so I embraced the turn of the field to complexity science, which merges computer modeling with big data analytics to answer such questions as, for example, why many animal populations go through boom-and-bust cycles.