Santa Fe Institute

The Santa Fe Institute (or SFI) is a non-profit research institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico founded by George Cowan, David Pines, Stirling Colgate, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Metropolis, Herb Anderson, Peter A. Carruthers, and Richard Slansky in 1984 to study complex systems. All but Pines and Gell-Mann were scientists with Los Alamos National Laboratory.

SFI's original mission was to disseminate the notion of a separate interdisciplinary research area, complexity theory (referred to at SFI as "complexity science"), but it has recently announced that its original mission to develop and disseminate a general theory of complexity has been realized (noting that numerous complexity institutes and departments have sprung up around the world — cf. CCS, CSCS at the University of Michigan, the CSE at UC Davis and the NECSI), and that it was working on updating its mission for the coming fifty years.

Scientists associated with the Santa Fe Institute

 * W. Brian Arthur
 * Per Bak
 * John L. Casti
 * Jim Crutchfield
 * J. Doyne Farmer
 * Murray Gell-Mann
 * John H. Holland
 * Stuart Kauffman
 * Christopher Langton
 * Brian Goodwin
 * Robert May
 * John H. Miller
 * Melanie Mitchell
 * Duncan Watts

Publications
The publications of the Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity all carry an imprint inspired by a Mimbres pottery design.