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A BEYOND BORDERS column by David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute.

By all accounts Plato was a zealot for geometry. In The Republic he wrote: “We must order in the strongest possible terms that the men of your Ideal City shall in no way neglect geometry.” The source of Plato's advocacy relates to his use of geometry — in particular ideas bearing on the indivisibility of lines — as a metaphor for the parts and the whole that define Being. . . . 

The human world is, increasingly, an urban one — and that means elevators. Two physicists saw this as an opportunity to explore the factors that determine elevator transport capabilities in their new paper in the Journal of Statistical Mechanics.

The crisis of COVID-19 exposed both weaknesses and opportunities in American education. These were the subject of an online SFI flash workshop on “Education, Equity, and Technology.”

Employing ecological tools such as food web modeling can help archaeologists create a fuller picture of the ways people interacted with their environment in the distant past.

By simulating the physiology and decisions of early way-finders, an international team of archaeologists, geographers, ecologists, and computer scientists has mapped the probable “superhighways” that led to the first peopling of the Australian continent some 50,000-70,000 years ago.

Newly published findings from a 2018 SFI working group show that Pueblo farmers often persevered through droughts, but when social tensions were increasing, even modest droughts could spell the end of an era of development. 

In a paper published in Science Advances, University of Michigan and Santa Fe Institute researchers report a novel belief propagation algorithm for the solution of probabilistic models on networks containing short loops.

An SFI-authored paper on “Nonlinear Information Bottleneck” is one of four papers to win the 2021 Entropy Best Paper Awards. 

Underneath the apparent messiness of forests lurk extraordinary regularities, governed by the biological mechanisms that drive universal forces of growth, death, and competition.

Now that cases in New Mexico are declining and the vaccination campaign is in swing, the SFI postdoctoral fellows are regrouping for a second Pandemic Pod, from April 16 –  23. Like its predecessor, this second Pod involves strict testing and quarantine measures.

Data extracted from the oldest surviving document recording Korean history shows a strong correlation between extreme weather events and war.

SFI welcomes new postdoctoral fellow Maell Cullen

At SFI’s Applied Complexity roundtable in March, SFI External Professor and MIT economist Andrew Lo spoke about “market adaptation” and applied a complex ecological and evolutionary lens to the market’s behavior under COVID.

In a new editorial at The Conversation, SFI External Professor Jessika Trancik argues that climate disaster can be averted most efficiently if governments pave the way for technological innovation.

SFI welcomes new postdoctoral fellow Tyler Millhouse.

A mathematical model, validated on a large dataset of U.S. political surveys, predicts that when two groups form, both want to exclude those in the middle.

During the 2020-2021 fall semester, school districts around the United States navigated their reopening plans with little data on how SARS-CoV-2 spreads among children or how in-person learning would impact transmission in the schools’ communities. A new study in The Journal of School Health joins a growing body of evidence that, with appropriate measures, there are ways for schools to safely reopen.

How we form and change our beliefs is a scientific question with profound social implications. In a new paper, SFI researchers outline "a unifying quantitative framework that enables theoretical and empirical comparisons of different belief dynamic models.”

New research reveals the geometry behind predictable scaling relationships that apply to cities worldwide. 

SFI researchers Dana Randall and Joshua Grochow were recently featured in Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP, a prominent computation blog.