SFI Fractal Faculty member Stuart Firestein's new book, It Could Be Otherwise, "proposes a subtly radical notion," writes SFI ...

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

In natural and artificial systems, the act of searching is ubiquitous, but it's also complicated: Searchers may die off or ...

“. . . 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 ...

Cultural traits — the information, beliefs, behaviors, customs, and practices that shape the character of a population — are influenced by conformity, the tendency to align with others, or ...

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 ...

In paper after paper over 25 years, Geoffrey West and his SFI colleagues methodically built a case for universal, mathematical scaling laws common to biological and human social systems. West’s ...

In 1907, a statistician named Francis Galton recorded the entries from a weight-judging competition as people guessed the weight of an ox. Galton analyzed hundreds of estimates and found that while ...

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 ...

When were Homer’s works written? One of literature’s oldest mysteries is a step closer to being solved after a recent study that dates the The Iliad to 762 BCE and adds a quantitative means of testing ...

SFI External Professor C. Brandon Ogbunu (Yale University) received a 2024 Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communications from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, ...

Four thousand years ago, human societies underwent a fundamental transition when the rules governing how people interact shifted from oral custom to written laws: first captured in stone tablets such ...