Mathematical proof dates back at least to Euclid in 300 BCE, and yet little is known about what happens in the mind when ...

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 ...

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 ...

SFI External Professor Laurent Hébert-Dufresne (University of Vermont) is the 2026 recipient of the Erdős-Rényi Prize, the top honor for early-career researchers working in network science. The ...

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 ...

Human intelligence involves many dimensions: we interact socially, learn quickly from other people, and determine how tasks fit together, as well as physically interact with and intervene in the real ...

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 ...

Francis Spufford, SFI’s newest Miller Scholar, is a prolific author whose writing often straddles the line between fiction and nonfiction. His history Red Plenty incorporates fictitious narrative, and ...

SFI External Professor Laurent Hébert-Dufresne (University of Vermont) has been named the 2026 recipient of the Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics by the German Physical Society (DPG).

This event is closed to the public. In October 1993, Mycoplasma galliseptum, MG, jumped the species barrier from commercial poultry into House finches. The pathogen’s presence was first detected by ...