Santa Fe Institute

The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is a non-profit research institute, located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States, dedicated to the study of complex systems. The aim of the institute was to create multi-disciplinary groups of young scientists to discuss alternative means to tackle current problems. The aim was to expose young scientists to alternative scientific approaches, and to learn about emerging scientific fields. The early scientific strands that proliferated at the institute were: genetic programming (with John Holland), neural networks (Andreas Weigend), fractals, artificial life, quantum computing... Part of the drive for the cross-pollinating emphasis of SFI was that the main scientific branches (physics, mathematics, etc.) had reached a plateau and weren't contributing much during the 1980-1990s. It was thought that opening up fields to new ideas and approaches were key to obtain new insights.
== 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.CCS, CSCS; The main faculty involved in this was John Holland
* The CSE at UC Davis CSE
* 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 NetherlandsInstitute Para Limes in Europe, retrieved 01 April 2008.]
Some of the other accomplisments 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. 
* From various works of the SFI school of the complexity economics thought was founded .
* SFI is coordinating the "Evolution of Human Languages" project, an attempt to trace all human language to a common root (cf. Proto-World).Evolution of Human LanguagesLinguists seek a time when we spoke as one. USA Today, 20 July 2007. 
==Faculty associated with the Santa Fe Institute==
*W. Brian Arthur
*Per Bak
*Tanmoy Bhattacharya
*Sam Bowles
*John L. CastiJohn L. Casti: Biography
*George Cowan
*Jim Crutchfield
*Jennifer A. Dunne
*Douglas Erwin
*J. Doyne Farmer
*Jessica Flack
*Walter Fontana
*Murray Gell-Mann
*John H. Holland
*Stuart Kauffman
*Bette Korber
*David Krakauer
*Christopher Langton
*J. Stephen Lansing
*Brian Goodwin
*Robert May
*Cormac McCarthy
*John H. Miller
*Melanie Mitchell
*Cristopher Moore
*Harold Morowitz
*Mark Newman
*D. Eric Smith
*Ricard V. Solé
*George Starostin 
*Duncan Watts
*David B. Weinberger
*Geoffrey West
*Douglas R. WhiteDouglas R. White - InterSciWiki
*Jon Wilkins
*Chris C. Wood
*Libby Wood
== 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
== References ==