The Infinite Alphabet

César A. Hidalgo is a physicist, professor, and author known for pioneering work in economic complexity, data visualization, and applied artificial intelligence. For nine years he led MIT’s Collective Learning Group before moving to France to found the Center for Collective Learning (CCL), an international research laboratory with offices at the Toulouse School of Economics and Corvinus University of Budapest.


Author of Why Information Grows (Allen Lane, 2015) and co-author of The Atlas of Economic Complexity and How Humans Judge Machines (MIT, 2014, 2021), he was the sole recipient of the 2018 Lagrange Prize recognizing excellence and innovation in the study of complex systems. Hidalgo is the author of more than sixty peer-reviewed publications that have been cited by tens of thousands of studies. His TED talk on augmented democracy has been viewed over two million times.