News + Events

SFI's Sidney Redner and Paul Krapivsky of Boston University have a new mathematical take on a classic problem.  

Seven thousand years ago, societies across Eurasia began to show signs of lasting divisions between haves and have-nots. In new research published in the journal Antiquity, scientists chart the precipitous surge of prehistoric inequality and trace its economic origins back to the adoption of ox-drawn plows.

Why it is that only some crimes supercharge from city size is explained in a new paper published this week in Physical Review E.  According to Complexity Postdoctoral Vicky Chuqiao Yang and her coauthors, the same underlying mechanism that boosts urban innovation and startup businesses can also explain why certain types of crimes thrive in a larger population.       

In a Topical Meeting for Applied Complexity Network (ACTioN) members, SFI delves into the complexity of commerce, September 12.

Infectious disease outbreaks often emerge when and where we are least equipped to detect and control them. In a series of two lectures, SFI External Professor Lauren Ancel Meyers discusses how network-based mathematical models data accelerate the detection and containment of outbreaks.
 

For over a century, anthropologists have attempted to describe human societies as “matrilineal” or “patrilineal” — emphasizing relatedness among women or men, respectively. A new paper by Laura Fortunato, an anthropologist at the University of Oxford and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, argues that it is time to confront the ambiguity at the heart of these terms.  

SFI's free online course, Introduction to Dynamical Systems and Chaos with College of the Atlantic professor David Feldman, begins Oct. 1. Topics to be covered include: phase space, bifurcations, chaos, the butterfly effect, strange attractors, and pattern formation.

Enrollment is now open for SFI’s flagship online course, Introduction to Complexity. The course will begin on October 1.

A new paper exploring social perception biases finds that the greatest perception biases emerge when majority and minority groups are disproportionate in size, and when nodes of the same group are highly connected to each other.

SFI welcomes 11 new External Faculty members.

Tuesday, August 27, evolutionary biologist and journalist Olivia P. Judson discussed the patterns of life throughout Earth's history.

A new Entropy paper analyzes games with players who were subject to error, or who were “boundedly rational.” 

Fasten your seatbelts and prepare for takeoff: InterPlanetary Transmissions: Genesis has hit the shelves.

A new paper in Animal Behaviour lays out three concepts from complex systems science that could advance studies into animal social complexity.

An incoming editorial team for a flagship political science journal aims to confront race and gender. They met at the Santa Fe Institute July 17-19, 2019 for a brainstorming retreat.

The July issue of Knowable Magazine published an interview with Jeremy Sabloff, External Professor Emeritus of SFI and past President of the Institute (2009-2015), about his work on “the archaeology of common folk,” which is reviewed in the 2019 Annual Review of Anthropology.

Computer scientist Melanie Mitchell, creator of SFI’s online education platform, was named co-chair of SFI’s Science Board at its 2019 spring meeting.

SFI Science Board member Derek Smith has worked in academia, industry, and public health. He is using insights from his work at SFI to develop an evolution-inspired flu vaccine.

SFI External Professor Raissa D’Souza (UC Davis) has joined the journal Physical Review Research as Lead Editor.

The Energetics of Computing in Life and Machines, edited by David Wolpert, Chris Kempes, Peter Stadler, and Joshua Grochow, lays out recent advances that are driving a new “thermodynamics of computation.”