Modeling is about making descriptions that help us explain, communicate and predict the behavior that we see or that we would like to see. Newton modeled gravity in order to explain the movements of the planets. Sigmund Freud’s personality theories attempt to capture human behavior. Newton used mathematics as a modeling language while Freud sticked to German. Models are used everywhere, often implicit. When, in a restaurant, you tell your kid to “behave nice and quiet, just like the boy on the other table”, you implicitly  provide him with a model of the behavior you’d like to see.

Humans have a natural flair to create and handle models. The human brain is probably the greatest modeling engine ever created.