Why did Obama voters pick Trump, or New Yorkers pick Mamdani? It comes down to complex political identity, a new paradigm ...

When physicists study a “random walk,” they’re investigating the path followed when you’re allowed to take each step in a ...

The Power of the Invisible: The Quantessence of Reality (University of Amsterdam Press, April 15, 2024), a three-volume set written by former SFI External Professor Sander Bais, is many different ...

“. . . 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 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 ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

To SFI External Professor Han van der Maas, psychology is the most fascinating science of all. It’s also one he sees as facing multiple crises — crises of theory, replication, and measurement.

In a recent paper, SFI Professor David Wolpert, SFI Fractal Faculty member Carlo Rovelli, and physicist Jordan Scharnhorst examine a long-standing, paradoxical thought experiment in statistical ...

Philip Anderson, a theoretical physicist who wrote rules that dictate the strange behavior of condensed matter and lent his deep intuition to problems beyond physics, died on March 29, 2020. He was 96 ...

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 ...