News + Events

What if life evolved not just once, but multiple times independently? 

In a new paper, published in the Journal of Molecular Evolution, Santa Fe Institute researchers Chris Kempes and David Krakauer argue that in order to recognize life’s full range of forms, we must develop a new theoretical frame. 

The Graduate Workshop in Computational Social Science (GWCSS) has been a core feature of summers at SFI for a quarter-century. This year, in response to the ongoing pandemic, the 26th GWCSS was condensed into two intensive and productive days online, and students completed a homework problem centered around a question of contemporary significance.

Dispatches from ATLANTIS is a new creative editorial series from the Santa Fe Institute's InterPlanetary Project.

The newest volume from SFI Press provides researchers—both novice and experienced—who study the human past the necessary background, discussion of modeling techniques and traps, references, and algorithms to use agent-based modeling in their own work.

The external faculty are central to SFI’s identity as a world-class research institute. They enrich our networks of interactions, help us push the boundaries of complex systems science, and connect us to over 70 institutions around the globe.

This year, nine new researchers join SFI’s external faculty. 

The Santa Fe Institute is looking for creative, early-career scientists for the SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships. Apply before October 24.

Does the universe follow patterns, or do we humans just see them wherever we look? In a new paper for the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, SFI Program Postdoctoral Fellow Tyler Millhouse proposes a criterion evaluating just how real a pattern is likely to be. 

If chemical reactions can be “programmed” like other types of computing machines, they might be exploited for applications in many areas, including intelligent drug delivery, neural networks, or even artificial cells, write SFI External Professor Juan Pérez-Mercader and Marta Dueñas-Díez in a review article for Frontiers in Chemistry.

We at SFI are often asked for reading recommendations, so we feel it is time to make our responses more broadly available to the public. Beginning with this first installment, future issues of our newsletter, Parallax, will feature three new recommendations on a specific theme, each from a different member of our community.

In which SFI President David Krakauer contemplates the trade-offs inherent in exchanging ideas online vs in person.

On September 1, SFI will launch a new “NEH institute,” Foundations and Applications of Humanities Analytics, to introduce early-career humanities scholars to new ways of studying culture with a wide range of computational tools.

SFI External Professor Orit Peleg and her colleagues find that some fireflies flash their lanterns in unison every half-second and look to their neighbors for signals on when to “switch on.” 

Melanie Mitchell’s life changed on the New York City subway. During her post-college stint as a high-school math teacher in Manhattan, every subway ride was an opportunity to conquer a few more pages of Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. Reading it, she became fascinated with the way math, art, and music could help explain the emergent properties of intelligence. She realized she wanted to work with Hofstadter and become an AI researcher. 

In 2011, Sean Carroll was sipping coffee on a boat traveling between Bergen, Norway, and Copenhagen, when it occurred to him that there was no better model for how life emerged from chaos than his favorite hot drink. Or, as he put it later, “why complexity increases with time and then decreases — in contrast to entropy, which increases monotonically.” The boat was hosting FQXi’s physicist conference, and when the theoretical computational scientist Scott Aaronson, who was on board, heard Carroll’s question, he fell in love with what he called Carroll’s beautiful idea.

In an essay for The New Yorker, SFI External Professor Dan Rockmore explains the stories behind famous mathematical theorems, and one that holds special significance.

A team of economists and scientists have published a new study illustrating how tools from ecology can help us better understand financial markets.

Richard Lewontin, 92, a revolutionary geneticist, evolutionary biologist, and longtime member of SFI’s science board, passed away in his home in Massachusetts on July 4. 

Complexity Explorer unveils a brand-new course on the many faces of computational complexity, with SFI Professor Cris Moore. The content is appropriate for learners from any background (and no mathematical heavy lifting required).

In a new perspective piece in Nature, SFI researchers and their collaborators argue that social scientists can gather highly accurate information about social trends and groups by asking about a person’s social circle rather than interrogating their own individual beliefs.

In a paper published in Nature Communications, incoming SFI Postdoctoral Fellow Yuanzhao Zhang and former SFI external faculty member Steve Strogatz report using temporal network models to show that allowing connection patterns to change over time makes it possible to synchronize a system more efficiently.