Last month, a workshop on the Science of History met to explore a series of provocative questions: How do laws and regularities in a domain like physics differ from those in human history? How might ...

Economic inequality is one of our primary global challenges and is a key research topic for archaeology — Why do some societies become deeply unequal while others remain more balanced? What clues ...

Humans learn by breaking through and plateauing, persisting and resting, and, occasionally, experiencing the blissful flow state. Mastering a skill can take decades, but the learning process ...

Scientists usually use a hypergraph model to predict dynamic behaviors. But the opposite problem is interesting, too. What if researchers can observe the dynamics but don’t have access to a ...

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 ...

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 ...

Cultural traits — the information, beliefs, behaviors, customs, and practices that shape the character of a population — are influenced by conformity, the tendency to align with ...

Over the past three years, SFI has hosted an annual Complexity-GAINs school — two-week-long programs organized around a theme for Ph.D. students — in different locations in ...

A new study in Theory and Society shows that the printing of witch-hunting manuals, particularly the Malleus Maleficarum in 1487, played a crucial role in spreading persecution across Europe. The ...

In The Complex World, the newest book from the SFI Press, SFI President David C. Krakauer offers readers a concise and comprehensive overview of complexity science, following its roots from the ...