Mathematical proof dates back at least to Euclid in 300 BCE, and yet little is known about what happens in the mind when ...

The Santa Fe Institute’s Complex Systems Summer School (CSSS) offers an intensive introduction to complex behavior in mathematical, physical, living, and social systems. Spanning four weeks, CSSS ...

This event is closed to the public. How do mathematicians think? What are the mental and social processes at work when a researcher chooses a theorem, searches for a proof, brainstorms with colleagues ...

This event is closed to the public. On average, English speakers utter around 16,000 words per day, most of it in interactions with other people. Yet, the language sciences have predominately ...

“. . . the true heir to Melville and Faulkner." —Harold Bloom, literary critic. "Today feels to me like a terrible disaster where many of us lost a good friend, the Santa Fe Institute lost one of its ...

In anticipation of Cormac McCarthy’s newest books, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris” (Knopf, 2022), former SFI Miller Scholar Laurence Gonzales recollects McCarthy’s long and ongoing friendship with ...

The sudden emergence of witch trials in early modern Europe may have been fueled by one of humanity's most significant intellectual milestones: the invention of the printing press in 1450. “Cities ...

Half a century ago, economic research took a little-noticed yet dramatic departure from the study of concepts most people might be familiar with from Econ 101. The field shifted from an almost ...

In paper after paper over 25 years, Geoffrey West and his SFI colleagues methodically built a case for universal, mathematical scaling laws common to biological and human social systems. West’s ...

The simulation hypothesis — the idea that our universe might be an artificial construct running on some advanced alien computer — has long captured the public imagination. Yet most arguments about it ...

In 1907, a statistician named Francis Galton recorded the entries from a weight-judging competition as people guessed the weight of an ox. Galton analyzed hundreds of estimates and found that while ...