Community Lecture Archive

First announced in the 1987 Santa Fe Institute Bulletin, SFI's Community Lecture series aimed to "increase the general public's understanding of the sciences of complexity and their relevance to today's society."

We continue this endeavor by bringing speakers from all over the world and across science to share their knowledge with the people of Santa Fe, always with an eye towards complexity. And now, this lecture series is streamed live and recorded for our broad global audience. These lectures have always been free to attend, and hanks to philanthropic funding from long-time SFI supporters Ian and Sonnet McKinnon, the same is true for our 2022 series.

Below you'll find a complete list of every SFI Community Lecture to date. We will continue to add more fantastic content to this archive, as lecture videos are published.

1987

• Stuart Kauffman: “Order from Chaos: Different Ways of Thinking about the Origin of Life”
• Harold Morowitz: “The Zen of Biology: Life Sciences in the Computer Age”

 

1988

• Lynn Nadel: “Maps of the Brain”
• Robert Schrieffer: “High Temperature Superconductivity”

 

1989

• James Gleick: “Chaos”
• Leslie Orgel: “The Origins of Life”
• James Bower: “Hands-On Science in Elementary Schools: A New Old Approach”
• John Archibald Wheeler: “Can We Ever Expect to Understand Existence”
• Brian Arthur: “Economic Survival in a High-Tech World”
• Philip Lieberman: “The Origin of Language”
• Linda Cordell: “With Trowels, Lasers and Computers: A View of the Ancient Southwest”
• Russell Mitermeier & Mark Plotkin: “Conserving the Tropical Forests: Global Imperative for the 90s”

 

1990

• Doyne Farmer: “The Future Evolution of Life”
• James Pelkey: “Entrepreneurs, Venture Capital and Technological Innovation: The Emergence of a New Industry”
• John Holland: “Learning in Machines and Man”
• Ilya Prigogine: “The End of Science”
• John Harte: “Global Warming: Causes, Consequences, and Cures”
• William Schopf: “The Earliest History of Life: Solution to Darwin’s Dilemma” 

 

1991

• Marcus Feldman: “Nature, Nurture, and Numbers: How to Interpret Heritability”
• Alvy Ray Smith: “Computer Graphics, Personal Computers, and Complexity"
• David Campbell: “Nonlinear Phenomena: From Paradigms to Practicality”
• Donald Glaser: “The Human Visual System: Should you Believe What You See?"
• Edward Knapp: “A Model for the Future of Science”
• Jose Schienkman & Alvin Baum: “Growth in Cities” Toward a Technological Innovation or Urban Failure”
• Marc Lappe: “Justice and the Human Genome: Social and Ethical Issues of New Biology”
• James Crutchfield: “Thermodynamics of the Artificial”
• Geoffrey West: “Scaling in Nature”

 

1992

• Christopher Langton: “Artificial Life”
• Stephen Lansing: “The Goddess and the Computer”
• Tom Furness: “Virtual Reality”
• Joshua Epstein: “Complex Systems, Nonlinear Dynamics, and Global Welfare”
• Johan Maynard Smith: “Major Transitions in Evolution”
• Tom Ray: “Virtual Life: Evolution of Digital Organisms”
• Murray Gell-Mann: “Getting Creative Ideas”

 

1993

• George Gumerman: “Anasazi Prehistory Reconsidered”
• Blake LeBaron: “What Does the Stock Market Tell Us About Real-World Behavior?”
• Oliver Sacks: “Neurology and the Soul”
• Will Wright: “Software Toys: Computer Modeling for Everyone”
• David Campbell: “Chaos, Order and Patterns: Paradigms for our Nonlinear Universe”
• Charles Stevens: “The Brain as a Computer”
• Robert McCormick Adams: “Reflections on Ancient and Modern Iraq”
• Dee Hock: “On the Nature of Beasts: Adaptation and Learning in Institutions”
• John Horner: “The New Age of Dinosaurs”
• Roger Shepard: “Perception, Pictures, and Paradoxes: What Illusions Reveal About the Mind”

 

1994

• John Rundle: “Predicting Earthquakes: New Ideas from the Sciences of Complexity”
• Jack Corliss: “Biosphere 2 as a Laboratory for Global Ecology”
• Murray Gell-Mann: “The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and Complex”
• John Holland: “Complexity Made Simple” – The First Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture
• Francis Crick: “How Do We See Things?”
• Mitchel Resnick: “How Birds Flock and Traffic Jams: Helping Students See the World in New Ways”
• Walter Alvarez: “Extinction of the Dinosaurs: Giant Impact and the Mexican Connection”
• Deborah Gordon: “The Dynamics of Ant Colony Behavior”

 

1995

• Susan Kieffer: “Rivers, Geysers, and Volcanoes: Geologic Nozzles”
• Ned Kahn: “The Garden of Complexity”
• Howard Gardner: “The Unschooled Mind: Implications for Education and Leadership”
• Chuck Paul: “Science on Ice: Laboratory Antarctica”
• Barbara King: “The Information Continuum: Evolution and Social Information Donation in Primates”
• Mark Miller: “Taste as a Complex System”
• Stuart Kauffman: “At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity”
• Alan Perelson: “Warriors Within: How Your Immune System Combats Disease” – The Second Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture
• Dean Falk: “Understanding Human Brain Evolution”
• Marc Feldman: “The Bell Curse: Cultural Transmission, Heritability, Race, and Politics”

 

1996

• David Marvit: “Multi-User Environments for the Masses” 
• George Lakoff: "The Adaptive Mind and Moral Politics"
• Paul Ewald: “Converting Medical Swords into Plowshares: Evolutionary Tools for Epidemiological Problems”
• Stephen Pinker: "How the Human Mind Creates Language”
• Gerald Fischbach: “Change in the Brain: The Plasticity of the Brain’s Synaptic Connections”
• Simon Levin: “The Emergence of Diversity: Self Organization and Ecological Systems” – The Third Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture

 

1997

• Barouch Fischoff: “Risk and the Public”
• Sherry Turkle: “Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet”
• Steven Durlauf: “The New Economics of Inequality”
• K. Winslow Farrell, Jr.: “Using Computer Simulations in Business: More Than a Game”
• Jonathan Same: “Epidemiology: Finding Patterns and Causes of Health and Disease”
• Lynn Nadel: “Stress, the Brain, and Memory”
• Jonathan Haas: “New Mexico in 1500: Pueblo Life Before European Contact”
• Melanie Mitchell: “The Past and Future of the Sciences of Complexity” – The Fourth Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture
• Paula Tallal: “Attacking Disabilities: Integrating Technology and Neuroscience”
• Lynn Margulis: “Gaia to Microcosm”

 

1998

• Frank Sulloway: “Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics and Creative Lives”
• Tom Gehrels: “The Beauty and Danger of Comets and Asteroids”
• John Casti: “In Search of the Limits to Scientific Knowledge”
• Geoffrey West: “Fractals and the Tree of Life: A Unifying Theme for Creatures”
• Lee Smolin: “The Life of the Cosmos”
• Frances Arnold: “Unnatural Selection: Proteins of the Future”
• John Padgett: “Making a State: The Rise of the Medici”
• Brian Arthur: “Complex Economics” –The Fifth Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture
• John Miller: “Complexity and the Political Process”
• James Crutchfield: “Arts and the Artificial: A Three-Lecture Series”
• George Johnson: “Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order"

 

1999

• Bernardo Huberman: “The Laws of the World Wide Web”
• Shripad Tulijapurkar: “Social Security: Gambling with your Future”
• “Allen Hammond: “Which World? Scenarios for the 21st Century”
• Tom Sigfried: “Science, Media and Public: A Complex Maladaptive System”
• Elliott Sober: “The Evolution of Altruism"
• Murray Gell-Mann: “The Regular and the Random” – The Sixth Annual Stanlslaw Ulam Memorial Lecture
• Janis Giorgi: “Uninfectable: The Question of Cellular Immunity to HIV”
• Andy Clark: “Leaky Systems”

 

2000

• George Gumerman: “Growing the Anasazi in a Computer: Creating Alternative Culture Histories”
• Persi Diaconis: “On Coincidences”
• Norman Johnson: “The Fall of the House of Experts, or a Reason to be Hopeful About the Future”
• Benoit Mandlebrot: “Fractals and Multifractals in Art and Finance”
• Douglas Erwin: “Evolutionary Innovations: How Ecology and Development Combine to Change the World”
• Michael Cohen: “Harnessing Complexity: Organizational Implications of a Scientific Frontier”
• Avidan Neumann: “Hepatitis C-Virus – Y2K Health Threat Alert: A Client Epidemic with Rapid Viral Dynamics”
• Charles Stevens: “The Brain as a Complex System” – The Seventh Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture
• Vera John-Steiner: “Flights and Resting Places: Discovering Complimentarity in Scientific Collaboration”
• Timothy Kohler: “Delight Makers and Delight Takers in the Archeology of Bandolier National Monument”

 

2001

• Martin Nowal: "Evolution of Language”
• John Mazziotta: “Mapping the Human Brain in Health and Disease”
• Naomi Oreskes: “Science vs. National Security: from Harald Sverdrup to Wen Ho Lee”
• Walter Bortz: “Redefining Human Aging”
• Everette Rogers: “The Diffusion of Innovations and Informatics Start-Ups in Santa Fe”
• Dan Schrag: “A Snowball Earth”
• Bruce Sterling: “Tomorrow Now, the Look and Feel of the 21st Century”
• Sam Bowles: “In Search of “Homo economicus”: Experiments on Five Continents”
• Geoffrey West: “Scaling the Tree of Life” –The Eighth Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture Series

 

2002

• Bette Korber, Alan Perelson, Rajan Gupta & Trevor Hawkins: “The Science of a Pandemic – Four Short Lectures and a Panel Discussion”
• Evelyn Fox Keller: “Making Sense of Life”
• John Harte: “Predicting Climate Change in a Complex Biosphere: A Daunting Challenge”
• Alison Gopnik: “The Scientist in the Crib: How Children Learn and What They Tell Us About the Mind.”
• Doyne Farmer: “Parables from the Study of Complex Systems and Their Possible Meanings in our Lives” – The Ninth Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture Series
  • "Propagation: From Machines to Societies"
  • "Prediction, Free Will, and the Ability to Alter our Environment"
• Stephen Lansing: “Rice Paddies, Coral Reefs, and the Goddess of the Lake”
• Peter Galison: “Einstein’s Clocks. Poincaré’s Maps”

 

2003

• Stewart Brand: “Discounting, Karma, and Finessing the Future”
• Duncan Watts: “Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age”
• Daniel Dennett: “Avoiding Disasters in Deterministic Universes”
• April Benasich: “Predicting Language Performance in Preschoolers: The Role of Infant Information Processing Abilities”
• Lord Robert May: “The Future of Biological Diversity in a Crowded World”
• Nicholas de Monchaux: “Spacesuit: 21 Stories and Statements on Technology and Design”
• John Geanakoplos: “Mortages and Mathematics”
• George Lakoff: “Where Mathematics Comes From”
• Lucia Jacobs: “Women, Men, and the Evolution of Spatial Navigation”
• Richard C. Lewontin: “The Coevolution of Organism and Environment” – The Tenth Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture 

 

2004

• Jeffrey Sachs: “Explaining the Persistence of Extreme Poverty in a World of Unprecedented Wealth”
• Charles M. Falco: “Through a Looking Glass: Rethinking 600 Years of European Art”
• Mercedes Pascual: “Disease-Climate Couplings in a Nonlinear World”
• Robert A. Eisenstein: “The Santa Fe Institute: Celebrating 25 Years of Scientific Excellence”
• Seth Lloyd: “Measuring Complexity”
• Hillard Kaplan: “Babies, Brains, and Lifespans: The Bioeconomics of the Human Life Course”
• Henry Wright: “Raising Civilization” – The Eleventh Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture
• Martina Morris: “Partnership Networks and HIV: Global Consequences of Local Decisions”

 

2005

• Maria Zuber: “The Carbon Cycle, Climate Variability, and the History of Water on Mars”
• Jeremy B.C. Jackson: “Brave New Ocean”
• Joshua M. Epstein: "Generative Social Science: Applications of Agent Based Modeling”
• Marcia McNutt: “Engineering the Ocean”
• Mark Newman: “The Internet, Epidemics, and Kevin Bacon: The Emerging Science of Networks” 
• Robert Kirshner: “The Accelerating Universe: A Blunder Undone”
• Marcus Feldman: “Molecules, Machines, and Mathematics: Issues in Biological and Social Evolutionary” – The Twelfth Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture

 

2006

• Dean Falk: “The “Hobbits” of Flores Island: Body and Soul”
• Christian de Duve: “The Origin of Life”
• Michael Mauboussin: “More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places”
• Douglas Erwin: “The Mother of Mass Extinctions: How Life on Earth Nearly Ended 250 Million Years Ago”
• Nina Fedoroff - “Our Plants – From Genes to Genomes to GM Foods” – The Thirteenth Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture Series
  • “How Plants See, Feel and Smell: The Perceptual Apparatus of the Plant Kingdom”
  • "The Jumping Genome: Changing Ideas about Hereditary and Evolution”
  • "Genetically Modified Foods: Monsters or Miracles?"
• John Rundle: “Forecasting Natural Disasters in the Chaotic and Complex Earth”

 

2007

• Felice Frankel: “More Than Pretty Pictures: The Power of Images in Science”
• Scott. E Page: “The Difference: How the Power of the Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies”
• Eric Smith: “Inevitable Life?”
• Bun Luce: “New Mexico’s Renewable Energy Future”
• Dan Rockmore: “Stylish Mathematics”
• Elizabeth Wood: “Sexual Violence During War”
• Terrance Odean: “Investor Behavior and Market Efficiency”
• Daniel Schrag: “Ancient Perspective on Future Climate” – The Fourteenth Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture
• Stephanie Forrest: “Borders and Gateways: Computer Networking in Everyday Life”
• Brian Arthur: “Technology Creating Technology”

 

2008

• Charles Stevens: "Why Barry Bonds is Better than I Am at Hitting Home Runs"
• Jon Wilkins: “Devil or Angel – Genetic Conflicts in Brain and Behavior”
• Ray Jackendoff: "The Peculiar Logic of Human Values"
• Seth Lloyd: “Programming the Universe”
• Peter Norvig: “Practice Makes Perfect: How Billions of Examples Lead to Better Models of Language, Pictures, and Other Things”
• Liz Bradley and David Capps: “Concatenation: Chaotic Variables”
• Charles Falco: “Art, Optics, and Human Vision”
• Dmitri Tymoczko: “The Geometry of Consonance: Music and Mathematics”
• Sam Bowles: “A Cooperative Species – How We Got to Be Both Nasty and Nice” – The Fifteenth Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture Series
  • “A Cooperative Species (or Are We Just Afraid Someone May be Looking?)”
  • “Altruism, Parochialism, and War: Rambo Meets Mother Teresa”
  • “Machiavelli’s Mistake: Why Policies Designed for “Wicked Men” Fail”
• Frans B. M. De Waal: “Our Inner Ape: On the Possibility of Empathy in Other Animals”
• David Gilbert: “Stumbling on Happiness”

 

2009 (Partial List)

• Amory Lovins: "What Will It Cost the Earth to Save the Planet?" 
• The Sixteenth Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture Series: “Adventures in the Simple and the Complex – A Tribute to Murray Gell-Mann:
  • Chris Llewellyn-Smith
  • Mark Pagel
  • Daniel Schrag
• Special Collaboration with the Santa Fe Symphony: “Voyages of Discovery: the Parallel Lines and Inventions of Darwin and Medelssohn”

 

2010

• Aaron Clauset: “The Future of Terrorism”
• Dennis Meadows: “The Club of Rome and Limits to Growth: Achieving the Best Possible Future”
• Dan Dennett: "Wild and Domesticated Religions: How the Machinery of Religion Evolved"
• Lauren Ancel Meyers: "The Swine Flu and You: Predicting and Controlling the H1N1 Pandemic"
• Mahzarin Banaji: “Mind Bugs: The Science of Ordinary Bias”
• Tim Buchmann: “Secrets of the Heart: The Electrocardiogram, Complex Systems Science and Fundamental Laws of Biology”
• Nathan Eagle: "Big Data, Global Development, and Complex Systems"
• Mark Newman: "Our Small World: How Networks of People and Information Shape Our World" – The Seventeenth Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture Series:
  • “The Connected World”
  • "What Networks Can Tell Us about the World”
  • "Using Networks to Make Predictions”
• Yochai Benkler: “The Penguin and the Leviathan: The Science of Practice and Cooperation”

 

2011

• William Free: “Conflict to Sustainable Development: The Complexities of a Way Forward in Afghanistan”
• Cristopher Moore: “Sending Secrets: Security and Cryptography in a Quantum World”
• Andrew Lo: “Can Financial Engineering Cure Cancer, Solve the Energy Crisis, and Stop Global Warming?
• Iain Couzin: “From Democratic Consensus to Cannibalistic Hordes: The Principles of Collective Animal Behavior”
• Jessica Green: “The Ecology of Indoor Environments: Microbial Biodiversity and Sustainable Well-Being”
• David Krakauer: “Cognitive Ubiquity: The Evolution of Intelligence on Earth” - The Eighteenth Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture Series
  • "The Adversarial Quartet"
  • "Invasion of the inferential Cell"
  • "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace"
• Molly Shaffer Van Houweling: “Copyright in the Digital Age: Mine, Yours, or Ours?” 

 

2012

• Jean-Baptiste Michel: “Culturomics: Science’s New Window on Culture”
• Brian Christian: “The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us about Being Alive”
• Dan Hruschka: “Friendship: An Evolutionary Puzzle”
• James Gleick: "How We Came to Be Deluged by Tweets"
• Rebecca Goldstein: "Appealing to Intuitions – Why We Can't Get Along without Them"
• Duncan Watts: “The Myth of Common Sense: Why Everything That Seems Obvious Isn’t”
• Lord Colin Renfrew, Sir Christopher Llewellyn-Smith, Murray Gell-Mann, Melanie Mitchell: “Complexity: A Discussion of Life, Scale, and Civilization”
• Scott Ortman: “Reading Ancient Minds: Metaphor, Culture, and Complexity”
• Robert May: “The Many Faces of Complexity” - The Nineteenth Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture Series:
  • “Beauty and Truth: Their Intersection in Mathematics and Science”
  • “What is Stability in Today’s Complex Financial System?”
  • “People and Tomorrow’s (Too Small) World”

 

2013

• Barbara Natterson-Horowitz: “Zoobiquity: What Dolphin Diabetes Can Teach Us About Human Health”
• Leysia Palen: "How Social Media Might Help You Survive the Next Big Disaster"
• David Eagleman: “The Brain and the Law: How Neuroscience Will Shift Blameworthiness”
• Leonard Susskind: “Why is Time a One Way Street?”
• Alison Gopnik: "The Minds of Children"
• Dmitri Tymoczko: "The Geometry of Consonance: Music and Mathematics"
• Michael Crow: “New Problems, New Partnerships: What Tomorrow’s University Must Be”
• Stephen Pinker and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: “On Moral Progress: Reason and Logic or Empathy and Emotion”
• Stephanie Forrest: “Complexity and Biology of Computation” – The Twentieth Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture Series:
  • “The Complex Science of Cyberdefense: Computer Immunology”
  • “Software Engineering: Evolving Computer Programs”
• George Dyson: “Turing’s Catherdral: The New Mexico Origins of the Digital Universe”

 

2014

• Thomas Lovejoy: "A Wild Solution for Climate Change"
• Ross Hammond: “The Challenge of Obesity, and a Systems Approach to Solutions”
• Robin Dunbar: “Why the Internet Won’t Gain You Any More Friends”
• Daniel Dennett: “Is Free Will an Illusion”
• Luis Bettencourt: “The Fabric of Our Lives: Cities, Slums, Neighborhoods, People”
• Seth Lloyd: “Is Time Travel Possible? Testing the Grandfather Paradox
• Steven Strogatz: “The Joy of X: A Guided Tour of Math”
• Tony Hsieh: "City as a Startup"
• Jeremy Sabloff: “Seeing the Future in Our Past: Why Archeology Matters” – The Twenty-First Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture Series:
  • “How Insights from Archaeology Might Help Us Shape Our Future”
  • “Maya Archaeology and Its Relevance to the Modern World”
• Sidney Redner: “I Get All the News I Need from the Sports Section”
• Richard and Ginger Rhodes: “Why We Kill: Violence as Socialization”
• Jeremy Sabloff, James Hartle, Geoffrey West, Klaus Lucas, and Murray Gell-Mann: “Reception and Discussion: The 2014 Presentation of the Helmholtz Medal to Dr. Murray Gell-Mann”

 

2015

• Daniel Jurafsky: “Eating Our Words: What the Language of Food Says About Us”
• Patricia Churchland: “Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain”
• Alex Pentland: “Ties that Bind: The Goodness of Social Networks”
• Susan Murphy: “Adaptive Intervention: Healing with Data”
• Alan Lightman: “The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew”
• David Krakauer, James Drake, Cormac McCarthy, Caitlin McShea: “Drawing, Reading, and Counting” - in partnership with the Lannan Foundation (recording embargoed until date TBD).
• Nancy C. Andreasen: “Understanding Genius: The Neuroscience of Extraordinary Creativity”
• Jennifer Dunne: “Learning from Food Webs: A Guide to Our Future” – The Twenty-Second Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture Series:
  • “The Hidden Order of Complex Ecosystems”
  • “The Ecological Human”
• Cordelia Fine: “Questioning the Science of Gender Difference: A New Perspective”
• 2015 Awards for Scientific Excellence - A Ceremony Celebrating Outstanding High School Students in Santa Fe

 

2016

• Karissa Sanbonmatsu: “DNA, Love, and Gender”
• Gary Marcus: "Smart Machines...and What They Can Still Learn from People"
• Annalee Newitz: “The Urban Species: “How Domesticated Humans Evolved”
• Carlos Castillo-Chavez: “Emerging Diseases, Deadly Lessons”
• Lynda Barry: “Biology and Creativity: Why Must We Write, Draw, Sing, and Dance?”
• John McWhorter: “The Language Hoax”
• Rosalind Picard: “Surprises at the Intersection of Human Emotions and Wearable Tech”
• Seth Lloyd: “The Information Edge: Creation and Destruction in Life, the Economy, and the Universe” – The Twenty-Third Annual Memorial Lecture Series:
  • "Birth"
  • "Collapse and Re-birth"
• Jordan Ellenberg: “Mining Math’s Gray Areas: Uncertainty and Contradiction”

 

2017

• Christoph Koch: “Consciousness in Biological and Artificial Brains”
• Michael Kearns: “Machine Learning and Social Norms”
• David Krakauer, Mike Gazzaniga, Daniel Dennet: “Caught in the Pulpit: Exploring the Journey from Religion to Reason”
• Sandra Faber Moore, Kate Greene, Jonathan Nolan, Dario Robleto, Scott Ross, Neal Stephenson, David Krakauer, Geoffrey West: “The InterPlanetary Project: An Introductory Panel Discussion”
• Tim Jenison, Farley Zeigler, Jessica Flack: “Painting and Optics in the 17th Century: A Film Screening and Panel Discussion”
• Geoffrey West: “The Future of the Planet: Life, Growth and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies”
• Rob Axtell, Colin Camerer, Michael Kearns, and Katherine Collins: “The Complexity of Economics” panel discussion
• John Geanakoplos: “Debt and its Discontents” - The Twenty-Fourth Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture Series:
  • “Trust and Panic”
  • “The Leverage Cycle and Forgiveness”
• Manfred Laubichler, Sander van der Lueew, D.A. Wallach, and Geoffrey West: “The Past, Present, and Future of the Anthropocene” panel discussion
• Nick Lane: “Energy and Matter at the Origin of Life”

 

2018

• Sidney Redner: “Randomness Everywhere”
• Chris Kempes: “Life On & Beyond Earth”
• Sean Carroll, David Krakauer, James Hartle, Jennifer Ouellete: “The Nature of Time” panel discussion
• Cris Moore and the Santa Fe Symphony: “The Majesty of Music and Math” (recorded owned by PBS, snippets available here)
• Damon Centola: “How Behavior Spreads"
• Samuel Bowles and Wendy Carlin: “After Trump and Brexit: A New Economics (Forget Red and Blue)”
• Sabine Hossenfelder: “How Beauty Leads Physics Astray”
• Cris Moore: Easy and Hard Problems” – The Twenty-Fifth Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture Series:
  • “Easy, Hard and Impossible Problems: The Limits of Computation”
  • “Data, Algorithms, Justice and Fairness”
• Christopher Monroe: “Quantum Computers”
• Michelle Girvan: “Harnessing Chaos and Predicting the Unpredictable with AI”

 

2019

• Dani Bassett: "Networks Thinking Themselves"
• Srividya Iyer-Biswas: “Laws of Life, Time, and Chance”
• Laura Fortunato: “Social Animals: How Evolution Shapes Human Social Behavior”
• Jean Carlson: “Toward a New Understanding of Aging, Adaptation, and the Arrow of Time”
• Sabine Hauert: “Swarm Engineering Across Scales”
• Olivia Judson: “The Dance of Rock and Life” (Recording embargoed until date TBD)
• Laura Ancel Meyers: “Preventing the Next Pandemic” – The Twenty-Sixth Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture Series:
  • “Outbreak, Detection, Prediction, and Containment in Human Social Networks”
  • “The Elusive Threat of Influenza”
• Jessica Flack: "The Collective Computation of Reality in Nature and Society"
• Melanie Mitchell: “Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans”

 

2020

• Rajiv Sethi: “Crime and Punishment in the Shadows of Doubt”

 

2021:

• David Krakauer, Eddie Lee, Rachel Kleinfeld: "Cascading Conflict: The Science of Violence" panel discussion
• Cris Moore, Melanie Moses: "Coded Bias: Film Screening and Conversation on Algorithmic Bias"
• David Krakauer, Geoffrey West, Sean Carroll, Zara Mirmalek, Laura Maguire: "Co-Ordination: On Time Between Worlds"

 

2022:

• Sara Walker: "Recognizing the Alien in Us"
• Stuart Firestein: "Ignorance, Failure, Uncertainty, and the Optimism of Science"
• Ricardo Hausmann: "Knowledge, Prosperity, and Economic Complexity: How Are They Related?"
• Sean Carroll: "The Many Worlds of Quantum Mechanics"
• Andrea Wulf: "The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World"
• Steven Strogatz: "Mathematical Stories – The Twenty-Seventh Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture Series:
  • "The Story of Calculus"
  • "The Story of Sync"
• Nicholas Christakis, Jessica Flack, and Matthew O. Jackson "Harnessing Social Capital to Enhance Collective Welfare" Panel Discussion

 

2023:

• Stephanie Forrest, Cris Moore, Melanie Moses: "AI: Oppression or Innovation?" Panel Discussion
• John Baez: "The Future of Physics"
• Andrea Wulf: "Magnificent Rebels - The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self"
• Vijay Balasubramanian: "How the Brain Makes You: Collective Intelligence and Computation by Neural Circuits"
• Ricard Sole: "Evolving Brains: Solid, Liquid and Synthetic" – The Twenty-Eighth Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture Series:
  • "Liquid Brains and Solid Brains: The Cognitive Biosphere"
  • "Synthentic Brains and Minds: What is Possible"
• Radhika Nagpal: "Taming the Swarm: Towards Collective Artificial Intelligence"
• Melanie Mitchell: "The Future of Artificial Intelligence"

2024: 

• Henry Farrell & Francis Spufford  "Comrades, Let's Optimize! The Surprising Rebirth of the Planned Economy" Discussion
• Diana Reiss & David Krakauer "Animals In Translation: A Conversation" 
• Tina Eliassi-Rad "Just Machine Learning"
• Brandon Ogbunu "What is Lyfe? Towards a Biology of Context & Complexity"
• Doyne Farmer & John Geanakoplos: "Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World" Lecture and Discussion
• SFI Celebrates 40 Years  – The Twenty-Ninth Annual Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lecture Series:
  • "The Complex World" by David Krakauer
  • "Complex Universe - Diverse Perspectives Panel" Melanie Mitchell, Sara Walker, Geoffrey West, and Thalia Wheatley