César A. Hidalgo is a Chilean-Spanish-American scholar and tenured Professor at the Toulouse School of Economics, where he leads the Center for Collective Learning. His work focuses on economic complexity, data visualization, and applied artificial intelligence, including the development of widely used metrics such as the Economic Complexity Index.
Previously, he directed MIT’s Collective Learning group (2010–2019) and was a research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School. He is also co-founder of Datawheel, a company specializing in public data platforms and economic development tools.
Hidalgo holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Notre Dame and has received multiple recognitions, including the Lagrange Prize and several Webby Awards. He is the author of influential books such as Why Information Grows, The Atlas of Economic Complexity, How Humans Judge Machines, and The Infinite Alphabet (2025).