In hmolscience, Bikas Chakrabarti (1952-) is an Indian physicist noted for 1995 to present work in econophysics and sociophysics, associated with what the formation of the Indian school of econophysics or what Russian-born American physicist Victor Yakovenko refers to as the “Kolkata school” of econophysics, a group which includes Indian physicist Anirban Chakraborti. [1]
Overview
In 1995, Chakrabarti was involved in the first Kolkata Econophysics Conference, discussed below.
In 2003, Chakrabarti, in his “Money in Gas-Like Markets: Gibbs and Pareto Laws”, coauthored with Arnab Chatterjee and S.S. Manna, considered ideal-gas models of trading markets, where each agent is identified with a gas molecule and each trading as an elastic or money-conserving (two-body) collision. Unlike in the ideal gas, they introduce a quantity the “saving propensity” $λ of agents, such that each agent saves a fraction $λ of its money and trades with the rest. They show that steady-state money or wealth distribution in a market is Gibbs-like for relation $λ = 0, has a non-vanishing most-probable value for $λ ≠ 0, and Pareto-like when $λ is widely distributed among the agents. They compare these results with observations on wealth distributions of various countries. [1]
In 2005, Chakrabarti was a coeditor of Econophysics of Wealth Distribution, with chapters themed on the Pareto principle of wealth distribution of Italian engineer and socioeconomist Vilfredo Pareto, and in 2006 was coeditor of Econophysics and Sociophysics, with its two noted thermodynamic formulation of socioeconomics by German physicist Jurgen Mimkes. [2]
In 2013, Chakrabarti coauthored Sociophysics: an Introduction, with chapters general social system modelling theory, social choice and popularity, crowd dynamics, etc., and six part appendix on topics including: phase transition, critical phenomena, magnetic systems, random walks, and Monte Carlo simulation. [4]
Education
Chakrabarti completed his PhD in physics, thesis: "Critical Behaviour of Annealed Disordered Systems" in 1979 at Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Calcutta University and in 1983 became a physics professor at Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics. Currently, Chakrabarti is a visiting economics professor at the Indian Statistical Institute.
References
1. Yakovenko, Victor. (2009). “Article”, in: Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science, Volumes 1-10 (editor: Robert A. Meyers) (§V3, pgs. 2803-08). Springer.
2. (a) Chatterjee, Arnab, Chakrabarti, Bikas K., and Yarlagadda, Sudhakar. (2005). Econophysics of Wealth Distribution. Springer.
(b) Chakrabarti, Bikas K. Chakraborti, Anirban, and Chatterjee, Arnab. (2006). Econophysics and Sociophysics: Trends and Perspectives. Wiley-VCH.
3. Chatterjee , Arnab, Chakrabarti, Bikas K., Manna, S. S. (2003). “Money in Gas-Like Markets: Gibbs and Pareto Laws” (abs) (pdf), Physica Scripta T106: 36-38.
4. Sen, Parongama and Chakrabarti, Bikas K. (2013). Sociophysics: an Introduction (abs). Oxford University Press.
5. Chakrabarti, Bikas K. (2005). “Econophys-Kolkata: a Short Story” (abs), in: Econophysics of Wealth Distribution (editors: Arnab Chatterjee, Bikas Chakrabarti, and Sudhakar Yarlagadda) (pgs. 225-28). Springer.
Further reading
● Sinha, Sitabhra, Chatterjee, Arnab, Chakraborti, Anirban, Chakrabarti, Bikas K. (2010). Econophysics: An Introduction. John Wiley & Sons.
● Chakrabarti, Bikas K., Chakraborti, Anirban, Chakravarty, Satya R., and Chatterjee, Arnab. (2013). Econophysics of Income and Wealth Distributions. Cambridge University Press.
External links
● Bikas K Chakrabarti – Wikipedia.
● Bikas K. Chakrabarti (faculty) - Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata, India.
● Chakrabarti, Bikas K – WorldCat Identities.
