Ulam Series Summary

Ulam Connection

The Stanislaw M. Ulam Memorial Lectures are given at the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico. These annual invited lectures, sponsored jointly by the Institute and Addison-Wesley Publishers, are dedicated to the memory of Stanislaw Ulam, a great mathematician from the now legendary Polish School Mathematics. Ulam came to the Institute for Advanced Study in 1935, worked at Harvard, the University of Wisconsin, and much later at the University of Colorado. Most importantly, he joined the Los Alamos National Laboratory in its founding year and was an intellectual force and inspiration at Los Alamos from 1944 until his death in 1984, fostering a perhaps uniquely intense interaction between mathematics and science.

Upon his passing, his wife Françoise donated his entire book collection to the SFI Library.

Past Lecturers

2012	Robert May “The Many Faces of Complexity” Part One: Beauty and Truth: Their Intersection in Mathematics and Science Part Two: Toward Tomorrow’s World Part Three: Stability and Complexity in Financial Systems
2011	David Krakauer “Cognitive Ubiquity: The Evolution of Intelligence on Earth” Part One: The Adversarial Quartet Part Two: Invasion of the Inferential Cell Part Three: All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
2010	Mark Newman “Our Small World: How Networks of People and Information Shape Our World”
2009	Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, Mark Pagel, and Daniel Shrag “Ulam Lectures honoring Murray Gell-Mann 80th Birthday” Lecture I: The Search for the Nature of Matter Lecture II: The Rise of the Speaking Machine-Human Language Evolution Lecture III: Twilight of the Anthropocene: The Fate of Civilization in the Face of Environmental Destruction
2008	Samuel Bowles “A Cooperative Species—How We Got to Be Both Nasty and Nice”
2007	Dan Schrag “Ancient Perspectives on Future Climate”
2006	Nina Federoff Lecture I: How Plants See, Feel, and Smell: The Perceptual Apparatus of the Plant Kingdom Lecture II: The Jumping Genome: Changing Ideas about Heredity and Evolution Lecture III: Genetically Modified Foods: Monsters or Miracles?
2005	Marcus Feldman “Molecules, Machines, and Mathematics: Issues in Biological and Social Evolutionary Theory”
2004	Henry Wright "Raising Civilization"
2003	Dick Lewontin "Coevolution of Organism and Environment"
2002	J. Doyne Farmer "Propagation and Purpose"
2001	Geoffrey West "The Scale of the tree of Life from Molecules and Cells to Whales and Ecosystems"
2000	Chuck Stevens "The Brain as a Complex System"
1999	Murray Gell-Mann "The Regular and the Random"
1998	W. Brian Arthur "The New Economy"
1997	Melanie Mitchell "The Past and Future of the Sciences of Complexity"
1996	Simon Levin "Fragile Dominion: Complexity and the Commons"
1995	Alan S. Perelson "The Warriers Within: How Your Immune System Combats Disease"
1994	John H. Holland "Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity"