News + Events

A new study in Theory and Society shows that the printing of witch-hunting manuals, particularly the Malleus maleficarum in 1487, played a crucial role in spreading persecution across Europe. The study also highlights how trials in one city influenced others. This social influence — observing what neighbors were doing — played a key role in whether a city would adopt witch trials.

In the past, a person might be diagnosed with hysteria — a mental condition for which no useful treatment could be possible, because the diagnostic category was too broad and unfounded. The idea of “hysteria” limited our understanding of the human mind. SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Marina Dubova wants to challenge contemporary categories and methods in science that may limit rather than enhance our understanding of the world.

Conventional approaches to the study of inequality focus on income and wealth, but an individual’s position within their economic networks is another important form of inequality. Efforts to understand these economic networks rely heavily on conventional surveying techniques, which often fall short when applied to populations defined by a stigmatized behavior or status. EPE and Applied Complexity Fellow Justin Weltz is developing new methods for gathering quality data about understudied groups. At SFI, he will focus on issues of policymaking and wealth inequality.

In a new paper in Science Advances, SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Yuanzhaho Zhang reports on how higher-order interactions can reshape a system at large — even global — scales.

"I remember the day when, at the age of 7, I realized that I wanted to figure out how reality worked," writes SFI External Professor Vijay Balasubramanian in this essay for Nautilus. "By the time I was 8, I was convinced that everything could be explained, and that I, personally, was going to do it." 

What is reality? And is there just one reality or many, perhaps infinitely many? In this essay first published in Nautilus magazine, SFI researchers David Krakauer and David Wolpert explore how scientists tend to think about reality. 

"This past spring on my way to the Santa Fe Institute, home to polymath thinkers and thinking, tucked into the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, I thought of writer Don DeLillo," writes Nautilus Editor Kevin Berger in his introduction to the magazine's "Reality" issue. "I was bound for a conference called 'Investigating Reality' that would feature talks by renowned physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, computer scientists, and artists."

The beliefs we hold develop from a complex dance between our internal and external lives. A recent study published in Psychological Review uses well-known formalisms in statistical physics to model multiple aspects of belief-network dynamics. This multidimensional approach to modeling belief dynamics could offer new tools for tackling various real-world problems such as polarization or the spread of disinformation.

In The Complex World, the newest book from the SFI Press, SFI President David C. Krakauer offers readers a concise and comprehensive overview of complexity science, following its roots from the nineteenth-century science of machines — evolved and engineered — into the twentieth-century science of emergent systems.

SFI External Professor Orit Peleg (CU Boulder) has been named a “Schmidt Science Polymath” by the philanthropic organization Schmidt Sciences. Peleg is one of six awardees this year who will each receive $2.5 million over the next five years to pursue risky, novel ideas. 

It’s become easier than ever before to engage with content online, particularly with features like infinite scrolling. However, the smooth user experience of social media apps encourages superficial engagement. In turn, this has contributed to the spread of fake news, misinformation, and hate speech. A September 11–13 working group discusses the impacts of introducing friction in social media to help tackle these problems.

On August 19–23, SFI Professor Melanie Mitchell and SFI External Professor John Krakauer (Johns Hopkins University) led a working group on “The Nature of Intelligence.” It was the first in a series of six meetings to be held over the next three years. Scholars from diverse fields — neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and AI — were invited to investigate the broad notion of intelligence, whether in machines or biological systems. 

In his new SFI Press monograph, Complex-Systems Research in Psychology, SFI External Professor Han van der Maas offers a roadmap for how psychologists could adopt and apply complexity science.

Robert (Bob) Maxfield, who served on the SFI Board of Trustees for three decades, passed away on August 13, 2024, at the age of 82. An avid learner with many interests, Maxfield first heard of SFI in 1989 while he was studying economics on his own time. He was asking questions similar to those that Nobel laureates and other experts in physics and economics were discussing at SFI.

A new paper by Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Kerice Doten-Snitker studies how government-sanctioned violence in medieval Germany diffused from one community to another. Doten-Snitker describes which factors encouraged the spread of Jewish expulsions in the Holy Roman Empire, and which had a dampening effect. 

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 more than 70 institutions around the globe. This year, seven new researchers joined SFI's External Faculty.

In this “Ocean Decade,” as declared by the United Nations, we face an unprecedented wealth of data documenting the world's oceans. Gathered with tools from satellites to autonomous robots, what once was an information paucity now has become a glut. An August 12–14 working group gathers an international cohort of BioGeoSCAPES Fellows to propose top priorities for the next era of highly interdisciplinary ocean science. 

In a new paper in SIAM Review, SFI External Professor Mason Porter (UCLA) and his students applied topological data analysis, which gives a set of mathematical tools that can quantify shape and structure in data, to the problem of quantifying voting deserts in LA County, Chicago, Atlanta, Jacksonville, New York City, and Salt Lake City. Using a type of topological data analysis called persistent homology, Porter and his coauthors used estimates of average waiting times and commute times to examine where the voting deserts are located. 

How did life come about on this planet? What forms might it take elsewhere? Assembly Theory provides a framework for understanding these questions, and in her new book, “Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence,” SFI External Professor Sara Imari Walker proposes a search for the rules that may govern how life could exist here and elsewhere.

In a new paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, SFI's Mirta Galesic and Henrik Olsson explore the benefits — and potential pitfalls — of several common analogies used to model belief dynamics.