Doug White's collaborations in recent years at the Santa Fe Institute, with mathematicians and social, physical and biological scientists, is the outgrowth of a career-long interest in synthesis of the human and the hard sciences, now taking place in interdisciplinary fields of evolutionary complexity, network dynamics, and self-organizing systems. The early 1960s found him searching for potential sources for synthesis, starting with a split major at Brown University in physics and the humanities. Impelled by his undergraduate dean's refusal to grant a double major to pursue such a career goal, White decided on two specific disciplines in which this synthesis could be attempted at the University of Minnesota, where he did his BA and PhD. These were Anthropology, chosen for its universal breadth of coverage of the human sciences (archaeology, prehistory, world ethnography), and Mathematics, providing the theoretical and modeling tools for the sciences. A decade later, as assistant professor at Pittsburgh, he produced the first broad theoretical synthesis in the interdisciplinary field of Mathematical Anthropology for the 1974 Handbook of Social and Cultural Anthropology. In the intervening period he had finished a comparative historical dissertation on social networks in American Indian societies, founded the Societal Research Archives System, a coded qualitative database for cross-cultural research (published in the 1971 Handbook of Method in Cultural Anthropology and distributed online through Dartmouth College to universities and colleges in New England), taught at the NSF Summer Institutes in Quantitative Anthropology, co-founded and co-directed with G. P. Murdock the Cumulative Cross-Cultural Coding Center, and developed and published with Murdock the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample as a framework for scientific collaboration in comparative coding efforts (continued since 1985 in the World Cultures e-journal). His 1971 reconstruction of social networks among Natchez Indians was a classic example of how processual and network modeling could solve analytical problems in the study of social structure, such as the famous "Natchez Paradox" of virtually every introductory text in Anthropology at that time. As a unique "traveling scholar" PhD student, before joining Murdock as Assistant Professor at Pittsburgh at the age of 25, he had also taken a year's work in Mathematical Psychology at Michigan (Coombs, Harary, Guttman, Boulding), six months of Mathematical Sociology at Columbia (Lazarsfeld, Henry and others at the BASR), and three months at Northwestern (Don Campbell and Raoul Naroll).

      In 1969 White began an intensive study of social networks in a world sample of 296 societies, finding a complex but structured dynamic by which role conflicts worked themselves out in widely distributed stereotypical behaviors such as joking relationships and avoidances, each of which occurred in over 50% of his sample. Presented at the 1975 Mathematical Social Science Board interdisciplinary conference in Social Networks, organized by Holland and Leinhardt, who had just completed an exhaustive study of triadic consistency models analyzed across 750 sociological datasets. A clash of paradigms was evident between triadic consistency models and White's complexity dynamic, which required a minimum role interlock models of tetrad INconsistencies, as proposed by S. F. Nadel. The contribution was dropped from the conference proceedings, but motivated White's continued research on networks and complexity from 1976 forward with a series of NSF funded large-scale network field-study grants (part of today's longitudinal social network field sites Linkages network). These sites produced a dozen massive multilevel and networked time-series databases on human populations that enjoy the support of the large-scale dynamical network analysis software (the Pajek software produced by Batagelj and Mrvar) for which White has been a consultant and concept developer since its early days.

      In 1970 White was invited to join the Mathematical Social Science Board organizing conference in Anthropology, funded by NSF and hosted by Kim Romney and Roy D'Andrade. There he met François Lorraine who had just completed an MA thesis at the EHESS in Paris (with social science mathematician G.T. Guilbaud) on a category theory model of structural equivalence, and had gone to work on a PhD at Harvard with Harrison White. He and Lorrain agreed to take on the development of social networks through organizing several interdisciplinary MSSB conferences in the coming years. Soon after publishing (1971) with Harrison on structural equivalence, however, Lorrain left Harvard to work with his family's business in Montreal. White, meanwhile, took on a two-year research project in Ireland (1971-73) in which he and his wife (a sociolinguist) did extensive studies of the social networks of language use in relation to Irish. They presented that work at the first MSSB conference on Social Networks, organized by H. Russell Bernard (1974). In Ireland White developed and programmed the statistical entailment software still in use for analysis of multidimensional partial-order Guttman scaling.

      Returning from Ireland in 1974, White sought out a former colleague at Pittsburgh (1967-1969) with whom he had shared thoughts about networks approaches to the social sciences. Lin Freeman had since moved to Nova Scocia and then on to Lehigh. They found they had both shifted their primary research emphases to networks, yet the people interested in networks approaches -- which they saw as an interdisciplinary field -- were scattered across different universities as well as different fields. To develop social networks as an interdisciplinary field, White obtained funds from HRAF for a 1974 planning committee meeting involving Freeman, Bill Lambert, Raoul Naroll and others. Freeman submitted an NSF grant in 1976, with White as an evaluator, to pursue the goal using the first trials of research-oriented computer conferencing on the internet -- then the ARPA net -- with EIES teleconferencing run at NJIT. Funded for the two years 1977-78, Freeman and White got network researchers from different disciplines to sign up, and succeeded with sociologists, anthropologists, historians, computer scientists, geographers, mathematicians and statisticians. In contrast to today's interdisciplinary collaborations, no physicists, biologists, chemists, or engineers came forward to participate. The teleconference helped to broaden interaction in the social networks community, breeding as well the SN journal edited by Lin (1979-). During the same period, Barry Wellman founded the International Network of Social Network Analysis (INSNA) in 1976, which loosely coordinated with the Annual "Sunbelt" meetings (the first organized by Russ Bernard and Al Wolfe) starting in 1981. White hosted the 2nd meeting in San Diego in 1982.

      When White moved to Irvine in 1976, he retained the vision of an interdisciplinary field of social networks, which led to his founding the Focused Research Program in Social Networks in 1978 and chairing Irvine's faculty group in Social Networks (1979), which became in 1981 the first Academic PhD Program in Social Networks. In 1979 he developed a full-scale prototype in APL for network analysis (similar in concept to the late 1990s version of Pajek and developed prior to the UCInet package), and in the 1980s developed an APL prototype for network autocorrelation analysis. He organized with Lin Freeman the 1980 UCI conference on social networks (resulting in the 1989 Freeman White and Romney edited book on network methods), and the recruitment of Freeman to the faculty in 1980.

      In 1984 White co-founded with systems physicist Arthur Iberall the Faculty Seminar on Hierarchical Physics and the Social Sciences that has continued to the present day, involving faculty from UCLA, UCI, USC, CUNY, and the University of Connecticut, in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, anthropology, psychology, economics, political science and law, and includes several of the original contributors to the sciences of complexity as well as participants in the Santa Fe Institute. Curiously, no sociologist has ever joined this interdisciplinary group, which has had only one member in common with the field of social networks.

      Out of a physics of complexity understanding of social dynamics, White expanded his longitudinal field site emphasis (the Linkages project) into a set of worldwide collaborative projects initially funded by the Wenner-Gren, then by NSF, and most recently by the Mellon Foundation. He also totally revamped the cross-cultural database for testing social theories with comparative ethnographic data by adding study-restudy data as well as time series coding of historical effects on local societies of the incursions or larger scale world civilization, and with a subproject with Mike Burton also funded by NSF. In the process he developed the prototype APL software package for the study of network effects across cultures, one of the early autocorrelation packages in the social sciences (1984-85). He and his students Malcolm Dow and Karl Reitz, along with Michael Burton, published a series of simulation studies showing the effects of network autocorrelation on regression results, as well as a series of studies using the method to efficiently estimate models of causality underlying the sexual division of labor cross-culturally, this on top of his earlier entailment studies of universal gender-specific implicational chains in the division of tasks.

      In 1989 White was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Distinguished U.S. Scientist Award (a two -year equivalent of the MacArthur for research collaboration in Germany) and began a long series of collaborations in the mathematical social sciences in Germany and France. The year spent in France before and after his Humboldt Award period was one devoted to developing applications of Galois Lattices to entailment-type discrete structure analyses of data on bipartite graphs of relations between individuals and their attributes, their group memberships, and their material possessions. This series of papers was edited with V. Duquenne in the Social Networks special issue on discrete structure analysis. The approach was extended by his Humboldt host in Cologne, Tom Schweizer, in a series of publications in Current Anthropology.

      Returned from several years in Europe using software graphics packages to study networks and discrete structure lattice representations, White reprogrammed the MAPTAB software that he had written earlier for cross-cultural data analysis and classroom use, in order to use extensive graphics capabilities for mapping and data representation. He also made an important generalization of techniques employed by French structural anthropologists in studying social networks: the p-graph system of coding genetic, kinship and marriage network so as to analysis social and genetic structure by use of graph theoretic algorithms applied to reduced graphs where nodes were marriages and links were individuals, an inversion of privileged position of individuals as nodes in most "methodologically individualist" social network studies. This structure proved to be the basis for a kind of fundamental "Feinman diagram" for starting to understand the nature of social networks in bisexual species. For humans, it proved key to understanding the dynamics of class and ethnic group formation through self-bounding endogamous groups.

      Through the work on self-bounding kinship systems, White made a fundamental scientific discovery. A current NSF grant supports research across 15 longitudinal field and historical sites on the hypothesis that self-bounding and hierarchical levels of k-connectedness (maximal subgroups in networks with k independent paths between all pairs of nodes) are what support the relational component of social solidarity, for which he coined the term structural cohesion. The measureable variable of structural cohesion was found to have downstream effects on scores of social structural and dynamical variables in social networks. The problem of computing k-connectedness is NP complete, which can be a problem for large networks, except that White and Santa Fe Institute mathematician Mark Newman recently programmed an approximation algorithm that runs in at a subquadratic level of algorithmic complexity. Currently he is analyzing the phase transitions in levels of k-connectivity underlying cohesion in the knowledge industry of biotechnology 1988-2000 and the renaissance industries of Florence, 1200-1500, in collaboration with Walter Powell and John Padgett, respectively.

      Abstracts of 27 recent publications, since 1997, are found at
      abstracts98.html,
      vita is at http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/6wwwvita.html
      teaching is at http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/seminars.html
      software written is at http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/softwdrw.html
      on-line programs are at http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/programs.html
      the World Cultures journal is at http://www.worldcultures.org/~drwhite/worldcul/world.htm
      Linkages field sites are at http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/Java/Linkages/Linkages.html
      and other links at http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/doug.html
      and http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/