News + Events

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.

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

Aug. 5-7, SFI hosts its second working group on cumulative cultural evolution, led by Vanessa Ferdinand, Rob Boyd, and Bill Thompson.

Today’s quantum computers sustain temperatures approaching absolute zero and are designed to solve problems that would require millions of years for even the world’s best supercomputers. However, the rate of hardware development is seemingly outpacing the growth of algorithms that can leverage the phenomena of quantum mechanics. A July 30 through Aug. 2 working group aims to address this shortage of algorithms.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

SFI's Sam Bowles, Mercedes Pascual, and Daniel Schrag have been elected as members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

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.