News + Events

Is merit necessarily achieved, or does social status influence whether a person succeeds or is trapped in a system? Former SFI Postdoctoral Fellows Eleanor Power and Marion Dumas, together with their colleague Jessica Barker, explore these questions in a new paper published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

SFI researchers cheered this October when the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Syukuro Manabe, Klauss Hasselmann, and Giorgio Parisi "for groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex systems.”  

In July, a virtual SFI. workshop began to investigate new ways of understanding how the brain computes using newly developed ideas in thermodynamics and information theory.

Stuart Firestein, a neuroscientist who specializes in the olfactory system and who is obsessed with the history, evolution, and future of science, joins SFI's Fractal Faculty.

In February. of 2020, a small SFI working group convened to find the third signature of nonextensive statistical mechanics, namely the distribution of energies. They have published their results in a recent paper in the journal Nonlinear Dynamics. 

In a paper presented at the 2021 Conference on Learning Theory, Cris Moore and his collaborators describe a new way to construct problems with hidden solutions, where algorithms come up empty.

Mathematicians call him an ecologist, ecologists call him a mathematician. SFI External Professor André de Roos is comfortable in interdisciplinary research settings, from Santa Fe to Sweden, where he is currently visiting Umea University's Integrated Science Lab on an H.M. King Carl XVI Gustaf Professorship in Environmental Science.

In an age where it's easier to get on social media than off of it, we still know shockingly little about how the scope, speed, and structure of online communication forums impact beliefs about stock market investing. This October, SFI partners with UBS to host a virtual topical meeting titled “Technology and Risk: Will Speedier and Deliberate Communication Bring Higher Levels of Risk?”

In which SFI President David Krakauer explores narrative, and why its end might not be such a bad thing. 

Join us on Wednesday, September 29, at 6:30 p.m. for a film screening and Q&A at the Violet Crown Cinema in Santa Fe.

Archaeologists have long had a dating problem. The radiocarbon analysis typically used to reconstruct past human demographic changes relies on a method easily skewed by radiocarbon calibration curves and measurement uncertainty. And there’s never been a statistical fix that works — until now.

To solve our most intractable and pressing scientific problems, humanity needs the best possible science to innovate solutions. The best possible science is science that is open, reproducible, replicable, transparent, and inclusive, says Open Science advocate and SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Helena Miton.

From small committees to national elections, group decision-making can be complicated — and it may not always settle on the best choice. A new mathematical framework shows that’s partly because some members of the group do research on their own, and others take their cues from the people around them.

Stanford linguist Merritt Ruhlen, a long-time SFI collaborator who co-founded the Evolution of Human Languages project, passed away on January 29, 2021.

SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Helena Miton received Central European University’s 2021 award for “Best Dissertation.” 

On average, people in larger cities are better off economically. But a new study published in the Royal Society Interface builds on previous research that says, that’s not necessarily true for the individual city-dweller. It turns out, bigger cities also produce more income inequality.

What if life evolved not just once, but multiple times independently? 

In a new paper, published in the Journal of Molecular Evolution, Santa Fe Institute researchers Chris Kempes and David Krakauer argue that in order to recognize life’s full range of forms, we must develop a new theoretical frame. 

The Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science (GWCSS) has been a core feature of summers at SFI for a quarter-century. This year, in response to the ongoing pandemic, the 26th GWCSS was condensed into two intensive and productive days online, and students completed a homework problem centered around a question of contemporary significance.

Dispatches from ATLANTIS is a new creative editorial series from the Santa Fe Institute's InterPlanetary Project.

The newest volume from SFI Press provides researchers—both novice and experienced—who study the human past the necessary background, discussion of modeling techniques and traps, references, and algorithms to use agent-based modeling in their own work.