News + Events

The rapid spread of the coronavirus around the world is a grim reminder of the importance of inter-governmental cooperation — and the consequences of trying to go it alone. A new paper published in PNAS and co-authored by SFI external professor Matthew Jackson found that infection rates from diseases like COVID-19 can be decreased if nations, states, and cities develop proactive policies that allow them to act fast to contain a crisis.

In a commentary this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, SFI colleagues Simon DeDeo and Elizabeth Hobson* discuss the science of social hierarchy — what rank is, what it does, and where it comes from.

Almost 900 confirmed participants joined “WOST II” — the second annual workshop that focuses on stochastic thermodynamics and its application to many issues involving complex systems. 

Katherine Collins has been elected Chair and has appointed Ian McKinnon as Vice-Chair of the Santa Fe Institute’s Board of Trustees. Their three-year appointments began May 3, 2021, following the board’s bi-annual meeting.

Darla Moore has been elected to the Santa Fe Institute’s Board of Trustees, with a three-year appointment beginning in May 2021. Moore is the Founder and Chair of the Palmetto Institute, a not-for-profit think tank that aims to raise per capita income in South Carolina.

In an analysis published in the journal PLOS One, alumni of the iconic Complex Systems Summer School took a close look at collaboration among a total of 823 participants who attended summer schools from 2005 to 2019.

Michael Mauboussin, Head of Consilient Research at Counterpoint Global, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, retired from his 8 1/2-year chairmanship of SFI’s Board of Trustees following the board’s bi-annual meeting in May.

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.