“I think that the next century (21st) will be the century of complexity”

Abstract. Complexity can mean many things to many people. This paper pre-sents an empirical, relativistic definition of complexity relating it to the system of interest, the behavior which is to be understood, and the capabilities of the viewer. A taxonomy of complexity is described based on this definition. Com-plexity and complication are compared and contrasted to provide some context for these definitions. Several methods of reducing or managing complexity are presented, namely abstraction, transformation, reduction and homogenization. Examples are given for each of these