News + Events
The latest news and events at the Santa Fe Institute
NSF grant to bolster women’s participation in computer science
The National Science Foundation recently awarded a three-year, $144,054 grant to SFI’s Learning Lab Director Irene Lee and New Mexico State University to collaboratively establish a computer science education program in New Mexico called YOGUTC: Young women Growing Up Thinking Computationally.
Paper: Geometry's least-packable shapes
In a new paper, SFI Omidyar Fellow Yoav Kallus takes a small but significant step in understanding mathematical shape-packing while addressing an old conjecture about which shapes pack least well.
Register now for SFI's 2015 Short Course in Santa Fe
Register now for SFI's 2015 Short Course — Exploring Complexity in Social Systems and Economics — August 25-27 in Santa Fe.
Paper: Ancient and modern cities aren't so different
Despite notable differences in appearance and governance, ancient human settlements function in much the same way as modern cities, according to new findings by researchers at SFI and UC Boulder.
Tracing languages back to their earliest common ancestor through sound shifts
A statistical technique that sorts out when changes to words’ pronunciations most likely occurred offers a renewed opportunity to trace words and languages back to their earliest common ancestor or ancestors.
New book posits an evolutionary game theory approach to fitness
A new book co-authored by SFI External Professor D. Eric Smith adopts an evolutionary game theory framework in which individual types and interactions are mapped to evolutionary fitness as a game played among agents in the population.
How multicellular life persisted
SFI Omidyar Fellow Eric Libby and co-author William Ratcliff explore how early multicellular life might have persisted amidst the evolutionary tug-of-war between single-celled and multi-celled living arrangements.
Paper: Role of institutions' prestige in faculty hiring negatively affects scholarly diversity, innovation
A quantitative investigation of the roles played by academic institutions' prestige in faculty hiring reveals a "closed doctoral ecosystem" that negatively affect a field’s ideas diversity, growth, and inventiveness.
Inheriting riches or rags: Wealth inheritance and inequality
SFI Professor Sam Bowles and collaborator Monique Borgerhoff Mulder recently held an invitation-only workshop at SFI to investigate the drivers of wealth inequality in human societies, including our own.
What do all human societies have in common?
Several researchers at SFI and Arizona State University have begun a long-term collaboration to identify and measure the commonalities across various forms of human social organization, from bands of hunter-gatherers to urbanites of today's megacities.
A family affair: Sharing of food across generations contributes to humans' long life histories
New research led by Paul Hooper, a former SFI Omidyar Fellow now at Emory University, explores the evolutionary implications of food sharing across generations in Amazonian forager-farmer societies.
From strings and quarks to cells and whales: Geoffrey West's essay among top papers of 2014
Geoffrey West's essay "A theoretical physicist's journey from strings and quarks to cells and whales" is among Physical Biology's top papers of 2014.
Watch Daniel Jurafsky's SFI talk - Eating our words: What the language of food says about us
During an SFI Community Lecture January 14 in Santa Fe, Stanford linguist Daniel Jurafsky explored the stunningly complex language of food and what it tells us about our culture and society. Watch it now.
Game mining: How to make money from those about to play a game
In a recent paper, SFI Professor David Wolpert and co-author James Bono reveal a way to get rich without doing any work at all.
Paper: Emergence of superconductivity in heavy-electron materials
SFI's David Pines and co-author Yi-feng Yang presents a model for a long-standing challenge for quantum physicists: explaining how superconductivity emerges in unconventional materials.
Tale of four (impoverished) countries: Why Ebola goes viral or dies out
In Nautilus magazine, SFI Omidyar Fellow Sam Scarpino explores why Nigeria has fared better in the Ebola outbreak than its similarly-impoverished neighbors.
ASU-SFI agreement establishes new Center for Biosocial Complex Systems
SFI and Arizona State University have launched a major new research and education collaboration that focuses on problems at the intersections of complex biological and social systems.
Three SFI scientists present the case for 'blue-skies' ecology
SFI External Professor Michael Hochberg and co-authors argue for more and less-constrained support of basic ecological research.
Study: Ebola transmission occurs mostly in social clusters
Transmission of the Ebola virus occurs in social clusters and fewer cases go unreported than previously thought, according to an international research team that includes two SFI researchers.