The economics status quo isn't working; it's time for a rethink. SFI and the Krasnow Institute present "The Science of Complexity: Understanding the Global Financial Crisis" May 16-18 in Arlington, Virginia. Follow the discussion live on Twitter at #rethink. ... More
As metro areas get larger their metabolic rate essentially speeds up, making them more productive and inventive, and greener, according to an article in The Atlantic that cites SFI's cities research. ... More
In an interview for Legg Mason Capital Management, SFI Trustee Michael Mauboussin interviews frequent SFI collaborator Ole Peters on the science of risk and reward, the limitations of traditional economic theory, and building optimal portfolios. ... More
This summer, SFI and George Mason University are offering an intensive two-week Complexity and Modeling Program (CAMP) for high school students on the GMU campus in northern Virginia. ... More
In a new study, SFI's Rogier Braakman and SFI's Eric Smith trace the development of life-sustaining chemistry on Earth and identify what they believe is the earliest ancestral form of carbon fixation. ... More
SFI Professor J. Doyne Farmer will lead the complexity economics program at INET@Oxford, a collaboration announced today between the James Martin School for the 21st Century at Oxford University and the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). ... More
An essay in OpEd News asks which economic perspective will inform U.S. financial reform, and traces the history of economic theory, including SFI's founding and the its role in the advent of "complexity economics." ... More
SFI has named evolutionary anthropologist Paul Hooper as a new Omidyar Fellow for 2012. ... More
A market behavior known as herding is not as important a trend as economists previously assumed, according to a recent paper by SFI Professors Doyne Farmer and Fabrizio Lillo and their colleagues. ... More
After the 2010 flash crash, economists wondered whether high-frequency computerized trading might present a whole new market ecology. In Wired, SFI Professor Doyne Farmer weighs in. ... More
Florence Nightingale advised that bringing fresh air into hospitals would help prevent the spread of disease. A recent study co-authored by SFI External Professor Jessica Green provides support for the idea. ... More
Cities are a source of many of the world's most pressing problems. But urbanization might also offer their solutions, according to SFI Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West in an online video. ... More
The complex web of predator-prey relationships in the Adriatic Sea have shifted, suggesting human harvesting is taking a toll, according to research by SFI Professor Jennifer Dunne and colleagues. ... More
In a video interview at CERN, SFI Distinguished Fellow Murray Gell-Mann discusses supersymmetry, the Higgs field, simplicity vs. complexity in physics, and SFI-style collaboration. ... More
In a study in the New Journal of Physics, researchers constructed a network from market transaction data that allowed them to identify investor heading behaviors, an approach they believe could lead to insights about how stock price is determined. ... More
SFI Omidyar Fellow James O'Dwyer argues that mathematics, combined with an ecological way of thinking, can help humankind better understand diversity in both ecological and human settings. ... More
An article in The Daily Beast calls SFI "America's smartest lunch" and describes how the convergence of scientists, humanists, and other scholars fosters the Institute's signature freestyle forms of collaboration. ... More
In a video interview, SFI President Jerry Sabloff says the language of mathematics has made it possible for researchers from half a dozen fields to ask new questions about social complexity. ... More
The Institute has named two longtime SFI-affiliated researchers, Cris Moore and Luis Bettencourt, to its full-time resident faculty. ... More
The tension between contingency and the regularities that underlie historical processes is a key to understanding many complex systems. SFI's 2012 Bulletin, now online, explores the interplay of time and chance. ... More
All living organisms collect information from their environments and use it to adapt. SFI Omidyar Fellow Simon DeDeo likes to think of this as a form of “natural computation.” ... More
At a session of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, SFI scientists described ways the latest research in complex systems might enhance the resilience and control of economic, social, and cyber systems. ... More
At a session of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, SFI External Professor Stephanie Forrest offered insights about cybersecurity, drawing inspiration from biology. ... More
At a session during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, SFI External Professor W. Brian Arthur offered insights about the impact of technologies that have the ability to disrupt economic systems. ... More
SFI External Professor Mercedes Pascual and colleagues have created a model that can forecast cholera outbreaks nearly a year before they happen in Bangladesh, giving public health officials more time to prepare. ... More
Cities are open systems whose free-flow of people and ideas continually rejuvenates them, whereas corporations are closed systems that peak and die, according to an InformationWeek article that cites SFI's cities research. ... More
In a radio interview, SFI President Jerry Sabloff discusses SFI's signature style of scientific collaboration, and what scientists are learning about the evolution of intelligence, cities, and social complexity. ... More
In Urbanite Baltimore, SFI Professors Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt discuss their nascent theory of cities, indicators of urban health and ideas for improving it, and Baltimore’s place in the metropolitan spectrum. ... More
SFI President Jerry Sabloff tells readers of the Santa Fe New Mexican what the Institute does, and why 2012 is a year for asking big questions at SFI. ... More
SFI has been awarded a major new grant from the John Templeton Foundation to pursue fundamental understandings of the hidden regularities in complex biological and social systems. ... More
SFI Omidyar Fellow Simon DeDeo describes his interest in "natural computation" -- in particular whether researchers can describe and analyze conflicts in animal societies as a series of computations. ... More
It's true that cities are magnets for crime, pollution, and disease. But they also are centers of innovation, economic growth, and efficiency, argue SFI's Luis Bettencourt and Geoffrey West in Scientific American. ... More
Is there a science of sustainability? A team led by SFI External Professor Luis Bettencourt has done the math and concluded that sustainability became a legitimate scientific field just over a decade ago, and the field continues to mature. ... More
The majority of the world's people now lives in cities, yet relatively little is known about urban systems, writes SFI External Professor Luis Bettencourt in a recent book review in Nature Geoscience. ... More
A quantum system collapses into a single location when an observer pinpoints it. But what happens when it is not being measured? Can it choose a location on its own, or must it wait for an observer? ... More
Runaway summer forest fires this year in the U.S. Southwest were no surprise to SFI External Professor John Rundle. Mathematical analyses suggest that large fires are a natural consequence of over-controlling fires for more than a century. ... More
The growth of the global population beyond 7 billion means the pace of innovation must also continue to increase, said SFI Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West at the recent Compass Summit conference. ... More
In a Q&A in Popular Science, SFI External Professor and Science Board member Seth Lloyd talks about the inner workings and future capabilities of quantum computers. ... More
Crowds of people move in highly predictable ways and are best navigated at the edges, rather than the inside of the pack, according to a Wired article that quotes SFI External Professor Dirk Helbing. ... More
On the talk radio blog Conversation Crossroad, SFI Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West discusses SFI's work to develop a unified theory of cities. ... More
In an interview on MIT's Cambridge Nights program, SFI Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West discusses the implications of metabolic rate scaling with species size. ... More
Catastrophic market collapses and rapidly inflating bubbles might challenge traditional financial risk models, but the models should consider extreme events, says a Science News article that cites four SFI researchers. ... More
Evolutionary biologists at Stanford, including SFI Science Board co-chair Marcus Feldman, examined why most cultures have a class structure instead of being egalitarian, concluding that the very inequities of the class system may have been the driver for its global spread. ... More
SFI's Chris Wood asks what the evolved brain has that modern computers don't, and suggests that having a more comprehensive understanding of the brain would allow us to apply new computational approaches to problem solving. ... More
Two SFI scientists say in a yet-unpublished paper that "hyperbolic discounting," a mathematical method for valuing future events that has been largely rejected by economists, can be more rational than economists' traditional methods. ... More
The Omidyar Fellowship at the Santa Fe Institute offers select scholars the opportunity to join a collaborative research community where they grapple with some of the most compelling questions of our time. Learn more here. ... More
The proto-language from which most modern languages descended likely featured a sentence structure in which the verb came last, say SFI's Murray Gell-Mann and Stanford's Merritt Ruhlen. ... More
With tens of thousands of scientific papers published every month, it is difficult for today's scientists to keep up. SFI External Professor Carl Bergstrom and colleagues are developing a way to visualize the big trends across the academic landscape. ... More
Results of the first-ever earthquake prediction contest are in, and they confirm that picking future epicenters isn't anybody's guess. Of the entrants, a UC Davis team that includes SFI External Professor John Rundle was among the best. ... More
At the Foundational Questions Institute’s recent conference on the nature of time, three SFI scientists offered perspectives from their respective fields. Watch their presentations here. ... More
A new book co-edited by SFI External Professor Stefan Thurner draws from math, physics, biochemistry, and cell biology to provide a comprehensive survey of today’s scientific understanding of evolution. ... More
SFI Science Board member and External Professor Seth Lloyd comments on the implications of recent experiments at CERN in which neutrinos were thought to have exceeded light speed. ... More
SFI's David Krakauer has been named director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. SFI Professor Jessica Flack will co-direct the university's new Center for Complex Systems and Collective Computation. ... More
The Santa Fe Institute is seeking nominations and applications for resident faculty positions. ... More
The Economic Times of India describes the complex systems science principles underlying statistical models some scientists, including former SFI Omidyar Fellow Aaron Clauset, are using to try to forecast terrorist events. ... More
All animals communicate, but of all the species on Earth, humans alone have language. SFI External Professor Mark Pagel asks why in a Santa Fe New Mexican article and in a TED Global 2011 video presentation. ... More
A new book by SFI External Professor Andreas Wagner examines four billion years of evolution for clues about the nature of evolutionary innovation. ... More
Physics treats sudden changes in complex chemical or physical systems as phase transitions. A new book examines phase transition phenomena in a broad range of complex systems, from ecology to society. ... More
In an Institute for New Economic Thinking video interview, SFI Professor Doyne Farmer discusses work to create an agent-based model of the U.S. economy that will help scientists, economists, and policy makers better understand past, and future, financial crises. ... More
A healthy society keeps aggressive individuals in check, just as a healthy immune system controls infection. New research by SFI scientists reveals an efficient means of containing conflict at many levels, from cells to societies. ... More
Humanity’s greatest social innovation is the city, says The Atlantic. The article mentions SFI research that finds surprising statistical regularities among cities, patterns the researchers relate to an underlying "urban metabolism." Watch the video here. ... More
In three Community Lectures over three nights, SFI Professor David Krakauer explored extraordinarily convergent theories from math, physics, computation, and biology describing the emergence of intelligence on Earth. Watch or download the lectures here. ... More
In a short video profile, SFI Omidyar Fellow Rogier Braakman describes his quest to reveal how chemistry evolved in the universe, from interstellar clouds to living organisms here on Earth. Watch it here. ... More
In a short video, SFI Omidyar Fellow Anne Kandler describes her research to model mathematically the decline of the Gaelic language of Scotland in search of insights about how endangered cultures might be preserved. Watch it here. ... More
A new blog by SFI External Professor Melanie Mitchell sorts the "fluff from the stuff" in complexity science. ... More
Fundamental physics is core area of research at SFI. It spans the principles of quantum and statistical mechanics, information theory, nonlinear dynamics and chaos, and discrete systems. These fields have provided techniques and approaches to problem solving that are useful across the sciences, and served as points of departure for the recognition of new principles. For instance, the application of self-organization to dynamical critical states arose from the study of granular systems, and agent-based simulation introduced a process-based generalization of Monte Carlo methods. Current and future SFI research in physics occupies four main areas: statistical physics with emphases on self-organized states and non-conventional statistics; foundations of quantum mechanics and quantum information and control; network structure and dynamics with a wide variety of applications; and scaling in social and biological systems. Significant progress has been made in understanding phenomena as varied as criticality in rainfall, modularity in complex networks, and metabolic scaling with body mass. Future directions in the physics of complex systems include universality in dissipative systems, quantum simulation and the feedback control of decoherence, and the structure of optimal distribution networks. The wide-ranging sciences brought together at SFI utilize more than merely existing methods and models from physics. Many dynamical properties in chemical, biological and engineered systems present new paradigms for organization that will expand the conceptual scope of physics.
External Professor
Professor, University of Amsterdam, Institute for Theoretical Physics
Professor, Santa Fe Institute
Scientist IV, Los Alamos National Laboratory, T-8
Science Board, External Professor
Professor, University of Colorado, Department of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering
Omidyar Fellow
Assistant Professor, University of Colorado, Boulder, Computer Science
External Professor
Director, Complexity Sciences Center, Professor of Physics, University of California, Davis, Complexity Sciences Center and Physics
External Professor
Professor, University of California, Davis, Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering
External Professor
Professor of Mathematics, University of Oxford, INET@Oxford
External Professor
Director, Center for Complex Systems Research and Professor, Physics, University of Illinois-Urbana
Science Board
Landon T. Clay Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Science, Harvard University
External Professor
Professor, University of Delhi, Department of Physics and Astrophysics
Science Board
Professor, University of California-Berkeley, Dept. of Integrative Biology
Science Board
Moffett Professor of Biology, Princeton University, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
Professor, Santa Fe Institute
Assistant Professor, University of Palermo, Physics
Science Board, External Professor
Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering
External Professor
Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Department of Physics
External Professor
Professor, Otto-von-Guericke Universität Magdeburg, Theoretische Physik
Professor, Santa Fe Institute
Professor, University of New Mexico, Computer Science, Physics and Astronomy
External Professor
Professor, Harvard University, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Science Board
Co-Director, Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter; Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois-Urbana, Department of Physics
External Professor
Professor, Research Director and Center Leader, University of Southern Denmark, Self Organizing Systems
Science Board
Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics, Master of Trinity College, University of Cambridge
External Professor
Professor, Dartmouth College, Mathematics and Computer Science
Science Board
Distinguished Professor; Director, Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Science, University of California-Irvine, Mathematics and Economics
External Professor
Assistant Professor, UCLA School of Medicine, Department of Systems Biology
External Professor
Professor emeritus, University of Vienna, Theoretical Chemistry
External Professor
Assistant Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, Statistics Department
External Professor
University of Oxford, Condensed Matter Theory Group; The Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics
Science Board
Dean of Science and Professor of Physics and Mathematics, New York University, Physics and Mathematics
Science Board, External Professor
Professor and Vincent J. Coates Chair in Molecular Neurobiology, The Salk Institute, Molecular Neurobiology Laboratory
External Professor
Head of Complex Systems Research Group, Medical University of Vienna
Omidyar Fellow
Assistant Professor of Engineering Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
External Professor
Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University, Computer Science
External Professor
Brazilian Center for Physics Research and National Institute of Science and Tech
Science Board, Science Steering Committee
Distinguished Professor and Past President, Santa Fe Institute
External Professor
Professor Emeritus, Anthropology, University of California-Irvine, Institute of Mathematical Behavioral Science
External Professor
Laboratory Fellow, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Chemistry Division
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