Santa Fe Institute
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The modern city of Santa Fe

The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is a non-profit research institute located in Santa Fe (New Mexico, United States) and dedicated to the study of complex systems.

Overview

The Santa Fe Institute was founded in 1984 by 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.

SFI's original mission was to disseminate the notion of a separate interdisciplinary research area, complexity theory referred to at SFI as "complexity science". Recently it has announced that its original mission to develop and disseminate a general theory of complexity has been realized. It noted that numerous complexity institutes and departments have sprung up around the world, including the following:

• The CCS and CSCS at the University of Michigan.¹
• The CSE at UC Davis ²
• The Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University
• The New England Complex Systems Institute
• The Institute Para Limes, a European initiative based in the Netherlands³

Some of the other accomplishments of the SFI 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.
• SFI is coordinating the "Evolution of Human Languages" project, an attempt to trace all human language to a common root (cf. Proto-World).⁴⁵

Faculty associated with the Santa Fe Institute

In popular culture

The fictional mathematician Ian Malcolm in Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park novels worked at the Santa Fe Institute.

See also

• Complex systems
• Complex adaptive system
• Systems thinking
• Dee Hock

References

External links

• Official SFI site
• New England Complex Systems Institute
• The Center for Complex Systems
• The Center for the Study of Complex Systems (CSCS) at University of Michigan
• Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) at UC-Davis
• First International Conference on Complex Systems
• YA "first" international conference on complex systems
• Evolution of Human Languages