SANTA FE INSTITUTE

I have the honor of being the President of SFI. The relatively young age of SFI has allowed me to know all of its previous presidents, starting with its first — the remarkable George Cowan. I have been inspired by their collective commitment to exploration, individual freedom, creativity, and scientific unification.

For all of us, the SFI mission that we have come to describe as “Searching for Order in the Complexity of Evolving Worlds” has been our guiding principle. And the community of thoughtful mavericks that call SFI their intellectual home — our networks of faculty, postdocs, and board members — collaborate without barriers of discipline or training. This makes SFI unique in the world.

It is the kind of place that I thought had to exist when I was a child — a place written into books of high imagination and impossible ambition — where archaeologists and quantum mechanists and evolutionary biologists worked together to identify and solve demanding and globally important problems. After years at universities I had given up the search and assumed that my childish beliefs were nothing more than naive hopes or at worst fictions. Until I discovered high in the mountains of the desert Southwest this improbable citadel of Complexity science.

It is a very special place. See for yourself.