News and events at the Santa Fe Institute
In a new paper, SFI's Jessica Flack offers a practical answer to one of the most significant, and most confused questions in evolutionary biology — can higher levels of organization drive the behavior of lower-level components?
SFI researchers quantify the thermodynamic efficiency of a fundamental biological computation.
SFI's inaugural Complexity Challenge asked participants in SFI's education programs to apply their studies to an abstracted, real-world problem. Read more about the challenge and the winning solutions.
In a two-part lecture series in Santa Fe on September 25-26, economist John Geanakoplos explored why it is that out of all economic variables, debt causes the most trouble. Watch part one of his talk here and part two here.
Enroll now for SFI’s Complexity Explorer course "Nonlinear Dynamics" with instructor Elizabeth Bradley, which begins Monday, September 4.
SFI's free online course, Introduction to Dynamical Systems and Chaos with College of the Atlantic professor David Feldman, begins September 4. Topics to be covered include: phase space, bifurcations, chaos, the butterfly effect, strange attractors, and pattern formation.
The Santa Fe Institute is launching an InterPlanetary Project — the first project of its kind to combine celebration with experimentation, and conversation with analysis.
Sarah Laborde, a 2014 SFI Complex Systems Summer School alumna, recently helped host a CSSS-inspired workshop in N’Gaoundere, Cameroon.
During a ceremony Wednesday evening, May 4, the Santa Fe Institute awarded Melanie McKinley its Prize for Outstanding Teacher, and recognized 13 Santa Fe-area high school seniors for scientific excellence.
Simon DeDeo's new tutorial introduces learners to renormalization — a method for blurring small details in order to capture meaningful features of complex systems.
Starting this week, a new online tutorial teaches quantitative approaches to understanding game-like interactions between multiple decision makers.
Enrollment is now open for SFI’s flagship massive open online course, Introduction to Complexity. The course will begin on April 9.
SFI has named evolutionary anthropologist Paul Hooper as its new Director of Education.
The Winter 2017 issue of SFI's quarterly newsletter is available online. Download it here.
During an October 18 SFI Community Lecture in Santa Fe, mathematician Jordan Ellenberg explored how math can help us think about the seemingly uncertain matters that dominate our lives. Watch his talk here.
Class Central, a site that collects information and reviews on thousands of online courses from around the world, recently ranked SFI’s “Introduction to Complexity” online course highest among 614 other online science courses.
Stephanie Forrest and Melanie Mitchell recount the legacy of John Holland, a complexity science pioneer who passed away in August 2015.
On the popular podcast "Waking Up with Sam Harris," SFI President David Krakauer weighs in on whether your brain is an information processor. It is, he says, because it converts disorder to order.
New research suggests that larger crowds do not always produce wiser decisions. Moderately-sized crowds are likely to outperform larger ones when faced with combinations of easy and difficult qualitative decisions.
Watch linguist John McWhorter deliver a community lecture in which he rethinks the widely-held belief that the language we speak shapes how we experience life.