Why did Obama voters pick Trump, or New Yorkers pick Mamdani? It comes down to complex political identity, a new paradigm ...

When physicists study a “random walk,” they’re investigating the path followed when you’re allowed to take each step in a ...

“. . . the true heir to Melville and Faulkner." —Harold Bloom, literary critic. "Today feels to me like a terrible disaster where many of us lost a good friend, the Santa Fe Institute lost one of its ...

The brain runs on about 15 to 20 watts, less than most light bulbs, but has still managed to evolve a voracious appetite for energy. In humans, it accounts for only about one-fiftieth of weight but ...

The sudden emergence of witch trials in early modern Europe may have been fueled by one of humanity's most significant intellectual milestones: the invention of the printing press in 1450. “Cities ...

In anticipation of Cormac McCarthy’s newest books, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris” (Knopf, 2022), former SFI Miller Scholar Laurence Gonzales recollects McCarthy’s long and ongoing friendship with ...

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 ...

Philip Anderson, a theoretical physicist who wrote rules that dictate the strange behavior of condensed matter and lent his deep intuition to problems beyond physics, died on March 29, 2020. He was 96 ...

In a recent paper, SFI Professor David Wolpert, SFI Fractal Faculty member Carlo Rovelli, and physicist Jordan Scharnhorst examine a long-standing, paradoxical thought experiment in statistical ...

In his biography of Elon Musk, historian Walter Isaacson describes a game of Texas Hold ‘Em poker in which Musk went all in — on every hand. “Isaacson uses the anecdote to show that Elon Musk is a ...

Think of the economy as a giant web where every person, company, and country is linked. When something big happens — a pandemic, the rise of artificial intelligence, or a climate-driven disaster — it ...

North America’s first cities developed long before the Spaniards set foot in the New World. Surprisingly, they were markedly similar to European cities. Indeed, in 1519 conquistador Hernán Cortés ...