News + Events

Tuesday, July 9, computer scientist Sabine Hauert discussed how individual actions give rise to swarm behaviors, and the challenges researchers face when engineering swarms for desired applications.

Instead of the typical bell-shaped curve, the fossil record shows a fat-tailed distribution, with extreme, outlier, events occurring with higher-than-expected probability. Using the same mathematical tools that describe stock market crashes, SFI researchers explain the evolutionary dynamics behind this universal pattern in the fossil record and uncover "a new normal."

In their essay for Aeon, External Professor Sara Walker and Professor Michael Lachmann argue that we would do well to understand life as a process of transmitting information.

In his new book Life Finds a Way: What Evolution Teaches Us About Creativity, SFI External Professor Andreas Wagner compares the tools of biological evolution with those of human innovation to make sense of the creative process that is happening in our minds all the time.

To start addressing pressing questions raised by the proliferation of new crypto networks, SFI hosts a workshop on “Collective Crypto” June 13.

A June working group meets to learn more about how public opinion changes, and how quickly.

A special themed issue of the journal Entropy gathers together "new developments and original applications of generalized statistical mechanics to complex systems of various natures.”

Borne out of a transdisciplinary Santa Fe Institute working group, Law as Data, edited by Michael Livermore and Dan Rockmore, explores the new field of computational legal analysis — the study of the law that uses legal texts as data.

Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate who revealed symmetry and order in the world of subatomic particles and leveled his genius at complex mysteries of life and mind, died peacefully May 24, 2019. He was 89 years old.

The second annual InterPlanetary Festival lands June 14-16, 2019 in Santa Fe’s Railyard Park.

A May working group brings critics of urban scaling theory to engage in respectful dialogue with SFI scientists in the Social Reactors project.

Agent-based modeling has been used to study everything from economics to biology to political science to business and management. This July, programmers and non-programmers alike can learn to model by enrolling in Introduction to Agent-based Modeling, an online course offered through SFI's Complexity Explorer.

Tuesday, May 21, 2019 physicist Jean Carlson discussed the interplay between biological aging, adaptation, and the arrow of time.

This June, Complexity Explorer offers its first course based on unsettled research into the "Origins of Life."

A new analysis of academic productivity finds researchers' current working environments better predict their future success than the prestige of their doctoral training.

While time and age in standard dynamical systems are treated as simple clocks that run at a constant rate, the human experience of age is measured by consequences. In this talk on Tuesday, May 21 at 7:30 p.m., physicist Jean Carlson will illustrate the interplay between biological aging, adaptation, and the arrow of time through examples taken from her research and focus areas of a five-year Santa Fe Institute research theme.

The 2019 InterPlanetary Festival takes place June 14-16 in Santa Fe, NM. 

Modular — or cliquey — group structure isolates the flow of communication between individuals, which might seem counterproductive to survival. But for some animal groups, more information isn't necessarily better, according to new SFI research published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

Across the globe in a variety of societies, royal women found ways to advance the issues they cared about and advocate for the people important to them as detailed in a recent paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Research.

Physicists at the Santa Fe Institute and MIT have shown that Markov processes, widely used to model complex systems, must unfold over a larger space than previously assumed.