Sahana Subramanyam was a participant in SFI's 2018 summer Research Experience for Undergraduates — now called the Undergraduate Complexity Research program. In this essay, she reflects on how the ...

SFI Resident Professor Melanie Mitchell has received a 2025 Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communications from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Global markets are complex systems, shaped by feedback loops, sudden shocks, and adaptive behavior that rarely follow textbook rules and that can’t be captured by neat equations. At its core, ...

In 2022, SFI donor Hank Schuyler launched an innovative fund that supports exploratory, boundary-breaking science among SFI’s postdoctoral fellows. Honoring Hank’s late wife, the Lou Schuyler Seed ...

It might start as a joke, a belief, or a rumor. At first, it’s easy to dismiss. But then it gains a twist, builds momentum, and spreads like wildfire. What causes some ideas to die out while others ...

In a network, pairs of individual elements, or nodes, connect to each other; those connections can represent a sprawling system with myriad individual links. A hypergraph goes deeper: It gives ...

In many careers, a person must learn foundational skills before advancing more deeply into their profession. Computer programmers need a solid foundation in basic mathematics; nurses must gain ...

SFI External Professor and Science Steering Committee member Michelle Girvan (University of Maryland) has been elected President of the Network Science Society, an organization that supports an ...

Large language models like GPT-4, the one behind ChatGPT, train on vast stores of data to complete one task: Produce a convincing sequence of words in response to a user’s written request. The tools ...

Medieval friar William of Ockham posited a famous idea: always pick the simplest explanation. Often referred to as the parsimony principle, “Ockham’s razor” has shaped scientific decisions for ...

In fields ranging from immunology and ecology to economics and thermodynamics, multi-scale complex systems are ubiquitous. They are also notoriously difficult to model. Conventional approaches take ...

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 ...