Scientists seek mathematical insights for taming and explaining ‘dragon kings’
The Mother of All Dragon Kings sounds like a character from Game of Thrones.
But in fact, it’s a mix of wartime rhetoric and a technical scientific term. A “dragon king,” in the lingo of scientists who study complex systems, is an outlier. It’s an event, or effect, or activity, that’s literally off the scale — so big, so calamitous, that it doesn’t fit in the range of expected magnitudes. Huge earthquakes, sudden economic depressions, companies worth $600 billion are the dragon kings of the natural and socioeconomic worlds. In older times, prime dragon king examples included outsized political entities, like the Roman Empire, or epidemics like the Black Death.