**Christophe Schinckus**

Christophe Schinckus is the Dean of the Faculty of Professional Studies (including the School of Business and the School of Computing) at the University of the Fraser Valley in Canada. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Leicester (UK). Chris has a pluridisciplinary background including an MSc in Engineering & Management, a PhD in Economics (University of Paris I – Pantheon Sorbonne) and a PhD in Philosophy of Science (University of Cambridge). Chris's research deals with Econophysics, Physics applied to Finance, FinTech & Cryptocurrencies, Energy and Economics, Social Finance, Anthropocene and Finance, Epistemology of Finance, and more generally with all aspects of epistemic post-modernism. He published more than 130 papers in peer-reviewed journals and a book on Econophysics (Oxford University Press). Chris has been listed in the Stanford University database listing the world's top 2% scientists for the year 2020 (based on standardized citation metrics across all scientists and scientific disciplines).

### **H. Eugene Stanley**

Harry Eugene Stanley is an American physicist and University Professor at Boston University. He has made seminal contributions to statistical physics and is one of the pioneers of interdisciplinary science. His current research focuses on understanding the anomalous behavior of liquid water, but he has made fundamental contributions to complex systems, such as quantifying correlations among the constituents of the Alzheimer brain, and quantifying fluctuations in noncoding and coding DNA sequences, interbeat intervals of the healthy and diseased heart. He is one of the founding fathers of econophysics.

### **Preface to "Three Risky Decades: A Time for Econophysics?"**

Our Special Issue we publish at a turning point, which we have not dealt with since WWII. The interconnected long-term global shocks such as the coronavirus pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and catastrophic climate change have imposed significant humanitary, socio-economic, political, and environmental restrictions on the globalization process and all aspects of economic and social life including the existence of individual people. The planet is trapped—the current situation seems to be the prelude to an apocalypse whose long-term effects we will have for decades. Therefore, it urgently requires a concept of the planet's survival to be built—only on this basis can the conditions for its development be created. The Special Issue gives evidence of the state of econophysics before the current situation. Therefore, it can provide excellent econophysics or an inter-and cross-disciplinary starting point of a rational approach to a new era. This requires the ability to study various coexisting critical phenomena and processes. It seems to us that the combination of physics and economics makes this possible.

Our current Special Issue is divided into nine topic sections (see Sec. 5. Content in Editorial). The topics of the sections show the research diversity of econophysics, even though it contains only a fragment of the topics that are of interest to econophysics (a subjective choice made by the Guest Editors).

Sections i and ix contain review/holistic articles on econophysics through the "glasses" of science of complexity in its historical context, including its present state and perspectives.

Section ii contains works devoted to time series analysis, i.e., analyzing the fundamental empirical data on which econophysics is based. Modern econophysics began its life by analyzing empirical data, such as time series.

The time series analysis has led to identifying an independent research stream correlation, memory, dependence, and relatedness. This subject is the content of section iii.

One of the younges<sup>t</sup> but already established trends in econophysics is the analysis of cryptocurrency markets, especially their similarities and differences concerning traditional financial markets. We present this trend in section iv.

Perhaps the oldest and, at the same time, the most developed part of the research areas of modern econophysics are financial markets and stock exchanges are included in this. We have included articles on this topic in section v.

Research on the company market has only recently become established in econophysics. Moreover, it is difficult to overestimate the importance of this market for economic and social life. For example, it is a base without which the existence of stock exchanges would not make sense. Section vi contains articles on this topic.

The concept of the relationship between thermodynamic formalism and economics, originating from Paul Ehrenfest, and especially the idea of entropy, has already been absorbed by economics. We have included the works devoted to this direction in section vii.

Ubiquitous financial risk is one of the thematic pillars of econophysics. This subject could not be missing from our Special Issue. We included it in section viii.

An excellent supplement to this Special Issue is our earlier Topical Issue (last update 30 June 2021) entitled: "Econophysics and Sociophysics in Turbulent World", which can be accessed via the following link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/ physica-a-statistical-mechanics-and-its-applications/special-issue/10ZXGBDQBD0.

We believe that we have provided extensive inspiration on the path of Special Issues, especially to the young generation.

> **Ryszard Kutner, Christophe Schinckus, and H. Eugene Stanley** *Editors*

#### *Editorial* **Three Risky Decades: A Time for Econophysics? †**

**Ryszard Kutner 1,\*, Christophe Schinckus 2 and Harry Eugene Stanley 3**

