Library SARC Research Organization
Santa Fe Institute
Independent research institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, founded in 1984 to study complex adaptive systems across disciplinary lines.
The Santa Fe Institute was founded in 1984 by a group of scientists, many associated with Los Alamos National Laboratory, led by chemist George Cowan, its first president. An independent, nonprofit, deliberately department-less institution, it became a central home for complexity science — the study of how adaptive systems in biology, physics, computation, economics, and society produce emergent order — drawing physicists, biologists, economists, and computer scientists into shared work. Christopher Langton continued his artificial-life research there, and novelist Cormac McCarthy was a longtime trustee and fellow.