News + Events

What is a city? In an SFI Community Lecture June 18 in Santa Fe, SFI Professor Luis Bettencourt peered inside the city, down to the data describing its neighborhoods and its people, for answers. Watch his talk.

In an SFI Community Lecture Wednesday, May 14, in Santa Fe, philosopher Daniel Dennett asked: if free will is an illusion, should we conclude that we don’t need real free will to be responsible for our actions? Watch the video.

Hooray! With your help, we met — and surpassed — our goal for Give Grande New Mexico yesterday, raising $9,313 that will help hard-working high school students attend C.A.M.P. this summer.

The Santa Fe Institute is seeking an uncommon leader to guide this world-renowned nonprofit research and education center. If you know a great candidate, pass it on.

SFI and the Santa Fe Alliance for Science have awarded 13 graduating seniors and one science teacher from Santa Fe with the 2014 Prize for Scientific Excellence. The awardees were honored at the Institute on April 29.

In an SFI Community Lecture March 12, evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar explained why our brains are hard-wired to maintain meaningful relationships with no more than around 150 people -- and this includes Internet relationships. Watch the lecture.

In Prospect magazine's World Thinkers 2014 series, philosopher and SFI External Professor Dan Dennett exchanges perspectives with philosopher Richard Swinburne on how academics should approach the study of religion.

On March 22 in Santa Fe, the Santa Fe Jewish Film Festival and New Mexico PBS are hosting a conversation between Emmy Award-winning historian Simon Schama and SFI President Jerry Sabloff on the contributions of Jews to human culture.

In an SFI Community Lecture on February 12 in Santa Fe, Ross Hammond looked to complex systems science for promising new approaches to the global obesity epidemic. Watch the video.

In a January 8 SFI Community Lecture, conservation biologist Thomas Lovejoy examined the impacts of climate change and explored how we might manage both biological and human economic systems to reduce its long-term effects. Watch his talk.

In a special Science On Screen event Tuesday, February 11, physicist Geoffrey West and director Mark Levinson introduced the hit documentary film PARTICLE FEVER, the story of the machine and the people who sought, and found, the elusive Higgs boson.

The popular Science On Screen series continues Tuesday evening, January 21, in Santa Fe with SFI External Professor Ole Peters presenting The Road, adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Cormac McCarthy.

In an SFI Community Lecture on November 6 in Santa Fe, historian George Dyson told the story of how a small band of young geniuses not only built the computer but foresaw the new world it would create. Watch his talk.

Are Big Data and predictive analytics truly a gold mine for business, science, and government? Or are they a serious threat to our privacy and freedom? Chris Wood offers perspectives from a recent SFI meeting in Santa Fe.

On Saturday, November 2, the Santa Fe Institute and the Santa Fe Symphony presented a unique immersion in sound and science featuring a multimedia presentation by SFI 's Cristopher Moore interspersed with musical selections.

SFI’s annual Business Network and Board of Trustees Symposium in Santa Fe this weekend will explore both the promise and the limits of Big Data, as well as the value of theory in the Big Data context.

You love math. You really do. I’m not talking about the kind of math that makes cell phones work or the kind that bankers use. I’m talking about math in its purest, most natural form — the kind that moves the planets in their orbits, gives flowers their shape, and makes a chorus sound like angels.

As the means to smelt ores and produce bronze spread through Europe, the new technology was one small part of broader sweeping changes in agriculture, animal husbandry, warfare, traditions of construction and settlement, and trade.

Theoretical neuroscientists and mathematicians gathered at SFI recently to explore new ways to let “embodied intelligent systems” – that’s robots – learn coordination. At the small working group October 8-11, 2013 at SFI, nine researchers began hammering out a new theoretical approach for enabling robots to learn to walk, for example, in much the same way infants do.

As the Institute approaches its 30th year, a group of distinguished scientists recently took time to revisit and build on questions of emergence.