News + Events

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.

In an SFI Community Lecture in Santa Fe, Steven Pinker and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein asked whether human moral progress is a gift of empathy and emotion or of reason and logic.

In a series of three lectures September 10-12 in Santa Fe, SFI’s Stephanie Forrest revealed surprising commonalities between computers and organisms, then described research that blurs the distinction further. Watch her talks.

Hundreds of 5th-8th grade girls spent Saturday, October 5, with New Mexico women who have chosen careers in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and computing.

The popular Science On Screen series continues Tuesday evening, August 20, in Santa Fe with SFI's Doyne Farmer and the 1974 quirky sci-fi cult film classic Zardoz.

In a June 26 SFI Community Lecture video, physicist Leonard Susskind reviews what modern cosmology can tell us about our notions of time and asks how we know the past is different from the future. Watch the video.