Santa Fe Institute

#TBT 🗺️ In 2001, SFI received funding from the MacArthur Foundation to study the long-range relationships of human languages with the purpose of shedding light on the evolution of human languages over time. 🌐 The Evolution of Human Languages project’s ultimate goal was the construction of a general phylogeny for the world’s languages through both traditional and modern methods.

Anil Ananthaswamy, 2024 SFI Journalism Fellow, released his fourth book, “Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI” yesterday. “Why Machines Learn is a masterful work that explains—in clear, accessible, and entertaining fashion—the mathematics underlying modern machine learning,” says SFI Professor Melanie Mitchell. https://lnkd.in/g3Wf4Hmz

Join us live as SFI External Professor C. Brandon Ogbunu offers a new framework for expanding the context for the study of biological systems. “What is Lyfe,” hosted by the Lensic Performing Arts Center, streaming right now: https://lnkd.in/eJxgwhR7

Diverse, evolving and interconnected forms of contemporary journalism require new methods of studying the media ecosystem. Djordje Padejski of Stanford University speaks today at Cowan Campus on the potential of complexity theory to orient researchers in the landscape of mass communication. Streaming today at 12:30pm MST on SFI’s YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gXqa7zHT

#TBT 🌪️ In the Fall of 2000, SFI had Constantino Tsallis as a visitor. The institute highlighted in its Bulletin his work on entropy and the development of a new expression for it as an alternative to the popular Boltzmann-Gibbs entropy. He used tornadoes as an example to demonstrate how low-probability events “grow up.” Today Tsallis’s generalization of the Boltzmann-Gibbs entropy is still being actively studied around the world. He has received 18,000 ISI citations with 4,600 of these being from his original 1988 paper about the generalization making him one of the most cited scientists in Latin America. https://lnkd.in/gxhmji-q

Telling the story of human evolution beyond genetic traits – epigenetics, environment, spread and development of culture, and how and why people conform to cultural norms – is the work of Kaleda Denton, who graduated with a Ph.D. in Biology from Stanford University. This month, she starts her SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowship, exploring how enforcement mechanisms maintain cooperative cohesion in cells, and societies. https://lnkd.in/gszr_t43

The strength of a state is no safeguard against ethnoreligious violence. Popular violence against ethno-religious minorities often presages state violence against those same minorities. Analyzing antisemetic pogroms in Medieval Germany, SFI Omidyar and Emerging Political Economies Fellow Kerice Doten-Snitker demonstrates how state and non-state violence join forces and precipitate genocide, in a new paper published in the Journal of Historical Political Economy – a special issue which she also co-edited and introduces – focused on the role religion and culture play in the arc of history. https://lnkd.in/gG2xrcWM

SFI’s External Professor C. Brandon Ogbunu has been recognized by Yale University with the Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication or Research. https://lnkd.in/gJjb3H-K

Play out the shifts and upheavals of #economic forces that shape our world! Interactive Economics, an education simulation developed by SFI External Professor Rajiv Sethi and Homa Zarghamee (Columbia University) gives participants the power to game out economic upheavals on their laptops and understand better the chaotic interaction of economic forces with social and political events. https://lnkd.in/eXx9z_cJ

Reserve your seat at SFI’s next community lecture. “What is Lyfe: Towards a Biology of Context and Complexity,” by SFI External Professor C. Brandon Ogbunu of Yale University, is live at the Lensic Performing Arts Ctr, July 16, 7:30 pm MST. Get your free ticket today: https://lnkd.in/g5ZXBj_u or watch the livestream on SFI’s youtube.