Geoffrey Brian West (born 15 December 1940) is a British theoretical physicist and former president and distinguished professor of the Santa Fe Institute. He is one of the leading scientists working on a scientific model of cities (see also, urban scaling). Among other things, his work states that with the doubling of a city's population, salaries per capita will generally increase by 15%.

Biography

Born in Taunton, Somerset, a rural town in western England, West moved to London when he was 13. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics from the University of Cambridge and pursued graduate studies on the pion at Stanford University. West became a Stanford faculty member before he joined the particle theory group at New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory. After Los Alamos, he became president of the Santa Fe Institute, where he worked and works on biological issues such as the allometric law and other power laws in biology. West has since been honoured as one of Time magazine's Time 100. He is a member of the World Knowledge Dialogue Scientific Board.

Selected publications