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Santa Fe Institute

Coordinates: 35°42′02″N 105°54′31″W / 35.7005°N 105.9086°W / 35.7005; -105.9086
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Entrance sign, Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico

The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is an independent, nonprofit theoretical research institute located in Santa Fe (New Mexico, United States) and dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex systems, including physical, computational, biological, and social systems.

The Institute houses a small number of resident faculty, who collaborate with many affiliated and visiting scholars. Although theoretical scientific research is the Institute's primary focus, it hosts a number of complex systems summer schools, internships, and other educational programs throughout the year.

The Institute's annual funding is derived primarily from private donors, grant-making foundations, and government science agencies.

History

The Santa Fe Institute was founded in 1984 by scientists George Cowan, David Pines, Stirling Colgate, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Metropolis, Herb Anderson, Peter A. Carruthers, and Richard Slansky. All but Pines and Gell-Mann were scientists with Los Alamos National Laboratory. In conceiving of the Institute, the scientists sought a forum to conduct theoretical research outside the traditional disciplines encouraged by academic departments and government agency budget streams.

Research

Research at the Institute focuses on systems commonly described as complex adaptive systems. Recent research has included studies of the processes leading to the emergence of early life, metabolic and ecological scaling laws, the fundamental properties of cities, the evolutionary diversification of viral strains, the interactions and conflicts of primate social groups, the history of languages, the structure and dynamics of species interactions including food webs, the dynamics of financial markets, and the emergence of hierarchy and cooperation in the human species, and biological and technological innovation.

Historically, researchers affiliated with the Institute played roles to varying degrees in the development and use of methods for studying complex systems, including agent-based modeling, network theory, computational immunology, the physics of financial markets, genetic algorithms, the physics of computation, computational chemistry and drug discovery, and machine learning.

The Institute also studies foundational topics in the physics and mathematics of complex systems, using tools from related disciplines such as information theory, combinatorics, computational complexity theory and condensed matter physics. Recent research in this area has included studies of phase transitions in NP-hard problems.

Some of the Institute's accomplishments are:

  • SFI's complexity research led to efforts to create artificial life modeling real organisms and ecosystems in the 1980s and 1990s.
  • Foundational contributions to the complexity economics school of thought.
  • The "Evolution of Human Languages" project, an attempt to trace all human language to a common root (cf. Proto-World).[1][2]

Resident faculty

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Other affiliated scientists

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Influence

SFI's original mission was to disseminate the notion of a separate interdisciplinary research area, complexity theory referred to at SFI as "complexity science". Subsequent to the Institute's founding, a number of complexity institutes and departments were begun, including:

See also

References

  1. ^ Evolution of Human Languages
  2. ^ Linguists seek a time when we spoke as one. USA Today, 20 July 2007
  3. ^ CCS
  4. ^ CCSR
  5. ^ CSCS
  6. ^ CSC
  7. ^ Institute Para Limes
  8. ^ Centre for Research in Complex Systems

35°42′02″N 105°54′31″W / 35.7005°N 105.9086°W / 35.7005; -105.9086

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