Like art and theological thinking, mathematics and other human endeavors are areas of human behavior that confer no apparent evolutionary advantage, require extreme concentration, and stretch the ...

As American midterm elections quickly approach, conventional narratives no longer fully explain who votes how. “The phenomena of Obama voters who switched to Trump in 2016, or the mayoral race in New ...

Influenza spreads in a crowded barracks or prison. Ebola proliferates when per-capita hospital beds plummet below the typical levels in developed countries. Bedside discrimination leads some patients ...

External Faculty are central to SFI’s identity as a world-class research institute. They enrich our networks of interactions, help us push the boundaries of complex-systems science, and connect us to ...

Most people favor one hand, and that hand tends to be the better one at writing, at throwing, at managing chopsticks. The long-standing view is that the dominant hand is “born” more capable, its ...

A chair can still look like a chair even when its surface is reduced to a sparse cloud of points. Humans are remarkably good at recognizing objects from this kind of minimal 3D information. A new ...

In the last decade, a phenomenon in artificial intelligence known as “double descent” has surprised researchers who study learning. The expectation was that the best AI models were neither too simple ...

The built and natural worlds around us are full of examples of diversity from small, incremental evolutionary changes. Keyboard designs offer slightly different key spacing and press stiffness; two ...

The brain runs on about 15 to 20 watts, less than most light bulbs, but has still managed to evolve a voracious appetite for energy. In humans, it accounts for only about one-fiftieth of weight but ...

Conversations about AI seem to have infused every field of inquiry, but are those conversations focused enough to be productive? “Because AI is like a giant octopus with tentacles going everywhere, ...

SFI External Professor Mark Newman (University of Michigan) has been awarded the 2026 John von Neumann Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) for his contributions to the ...