News + Events

New books by SFI Authors, highlighted in the Fall 2017 Parallax, inclue The Diversity Bonus, The Economy, Maya E Groups, and History, Big History, & Metahistory.

The Santa Fe Institute invites space enthusiasts of all ages and backgrounds to engage with the pressing problems of today by imagining the challenges of tomorrow in a series of city-wide events from October 13 through October 17.

In a two-part lecture series in Santa Fe on September 25-26, economist John Geanakoplos explored why it is that out of all economic variables, debt causes the most trouble. Watch part one of his talk here and part two here.

The body includes the brain — so what role does it play in intelligence? An SFI working group meets to explore morphological computation and a theory of embodied intelligence.

The Economy, a new SFI-inspired textbook, is published in paperback format and as a free, online interactive text. The book aims to address the gap between complex, real-world economic problems and the topics traditionally taught in first-year economics courses.

Distinguished Professor Geoffrey West presented the origin of scaling laws and their compelling implications for explaining everything from the lifecycles of companies, to a grand unified theory of sustainability on August 29, 2017.  Watch his talk here.  

Colleagues, friends, and family gather to remember the life and work of Harold Morowitz, and to keep moving his ideas forward. 

SFI Maya Working Group meets for fifth time to produce a second book.

A June working group explored ways to model interactions between organisms and a public good, where both can diffuse in space.

Two August workshops convene physicists, computer scientists, and biologists to discuss energy flow during computation.

Sophisticated network analysis means finding relationships that often aren’t easy to see. A new algorithm from an interdisciplinary team at SFI identifies relationships not only within individual layers, but also across multiple layers.

For rulers in pre-modern states, marrying the right wife was often a path to military victory.

A team led by SFI postdoctoral researcher Laurent Hébert-Dufresne asks under what conditions a Zika outbreak might be sustained where mosquitos play no role.

Farley Ziegler, Tim Jenison, and SFI Professor Jessica Flack presented an SFI Community Lecture on painting and optics in the 17th Century and a screening of Tim's Vermeer at The Lensic Performing Arts Center on August 1.

In a new paper published in Ibis, researchers explore why Peruvian parrots eat clay despite its apparent lack of nutritional value.

When a highly-networked research institute joins forces with a vast web of citation data, new insights are bound to emerge.

An SFI working group explores how well society is prepared to deal with the accelerating pace of technological change.

Actor-playwright-director Sam Shepard, an SFI Miller Scholar, died July 27, 2017 at the age of 73.

President David Krakauer remembers "brilliant and gracious polymath" Sam Shepard, an SFI Miller Scholar who passed away July 27, 2017.

SFI President David Krakauer talks with Forbes contributor Robert Wolcott about how changing technology shapes the human experience.