Overview

Transmission is the Santa Fe Institute's real-time and ideas-based response to the COVID-19 outbreak. 

Many of our researchers are hard at work collaborating on the monitoring and modeling of the epidemic, the development of vaccines and tests, and seeking to project the socio-economic impact of the disease as well as plotting paths to recovery.

Beyond this important SFI applied science, Transmission allows our researchers to address issues that relate to the complexity of the pandemic. And we hope these will be of value and even of use to society at large. 

In Transmission, we are introducing ideas from complexity science to include: why systems collapse, the nature of an evolving virus and its ecology, how networks spread disease and economic instability, the mathematics of modeling outbreaks, the way decision-making modifies disease spread, and many other ideas that touch on the disease.

Transmission articles will all be brief and varied in their technical demands. But all of them will strive to get across a few key ideas or methods that our researchers feel are worth communicating.

I sincerely hope that some of these Transmissions from the world of complexity science provide you with valuable insights. 

Safety through reason,

David Krakauer
President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems
Santa Fe Institute

 

PDFs of the posts in the Transmission series:

BATCH 1, released 30 March 2020

 

BATCH 2, released 6 April 2020

 

BATCH 3, released 13 April 2020

 

BATCH 4, released 20 April 2020

 

BATCH 5, released 27 April 2020
 

 

BATCH 6, released 4 May 2020