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.

Contents 1 Overview 2 Resident faculty 3 Other associated faculty 4 In popular culture 5 See also 6 References 7 External links

[edit] 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 at Florida Atlantic University ^[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 Netherlands^[3]

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).^[4][5]

[edit] Resident faculty

[edit] Other associated faculty

[edit] In popular culture

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

[edit] See also

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

[edit] References

[edit] 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
• The Santa Fe Complex
• First International Conference on Complex Systems
• YA "first" international conference on complex systems
• Evolution of Human Languages