A complex system is a system composed of many components which may interact with each other. Examples of complex systems are Earth's global climate, organisms, the human brain, infrastructure such as power grid, transportation or communication systems, complex software and electronic systems, social and economic organizations, an ecosystem, a living cell, and, ultimately, for some authors, the entire universe.
Stephen Wolfram is a British-American computer scientist, physicist, and businessman. He is known for his work in computer algebra, and theoretical physics. In 2012, he was named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Computational sociology is a branch of sociology that uses computationally intensive methods to analyze and model social phenomena. Using computer simulations, artificial intelligence, complex statistical methods, and analytic approaches like social network analysis, computational sociology develops and tests theories of complex social processes through bottom-up modeling of social interactions.
Christopher Gale Langton is an American computer scientist and one of the founders of the field of artificial life. He coined the term in the late 1980s when he organized the first "Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems" at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1987. Following his time at Los Alamos, Langton joined the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), to continue his research on artificial life. He left SFI in the late 1990s, and abandoned his work on artificial life, publishing no research since that time.
John Henry Holland was an American scientist and professor of psychology and electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He was a pioneer in what became known as genetic algorithms.
The Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study brings together researchers from many disciplines to study the phenomenon known as the mind. A unit of George Mason University, the Krasnow Institute also serves as a center for doctoral education in neuroscience. Research at the institute is funded by agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense.
George Arthur Cowan was an American physical chemist, a businessman and philanthropist.
Melanie Mitchell is an American scientist. She is the Davis Professor of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute. Her major work has been in the areas of analogical reasoning, complex systems, genetic algorithms and cellular automata, and her publications in those fields are frequently cited.
Joseph Frederick Traub was an American computer scientist. He was the Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He held positions at Bell Laboratories, University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon, and Columbia, as well as sabbatical positions at Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, California Institute of Technology, and Technical University, Munich.
William Brian Arthur is a Belfast-born economist credited with developing the modern approach to increasing returns. He has lived and worked in Northern California for many years. He is an authority on economics in relation to complexity theory, technology and financial markets. He has been on the external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, and a Visiting Researcher at the Intelligent Systems Lab at PARC. He is credited with the invention of the El Farol Bar problem.
Vincent Daniel Blondel is a Belgian professor of applied mathematics and former rector of the University of Louvain (UCLouvain) and a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Blondel's research lies in the area of mathematical control theory and theoretical computer science. He is mostly known for his contributions in computational complexity in control, multi-agent coordination and complex networks.
Cristopher David Moore, known as Cris Moore, is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and physicist. He is resident faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, and was formerly a full professor at the University of New Mexico. He is an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Mathematical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
James P. Crutchfield is an American mathematician and physicist. He received his B.A. summa cum laude in physics and mathematics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1979 and his Ph.D. in physics there in 1983. He is currently a professor of physics at the University of California, Davis, where he is director of the Complexity Sciences Center—a new research and graduate program in complex systems. Prior to this, he was research professor at the Santa Fe Institute for many years, where he ran the Dynamics of Learning Group and SFI's Network Dynamics Program. From 1985 to 1997, he was a research physicist in the physics department at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been a visiting research professor at the Sloan Center for Theoretical Neurobiology, University of California, San Francisco; a postdoctoral fellow of the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at UCB; a UCB physics department IBM postdoctoral fellow in condensed matter physics; a distinguished visiting research professor of the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and a Bernard Osher Fellow at the San Francisco Exploratorium.
David Hilton Wolpert is an American physicist and computer scientist. He is a professor at Santa Fe Institute. He is the author of three books, three patents, over one hundred refereed papers, and has received two awards. His name is particularly associated with a theorem in computer science known as "no free lunch".
Luis M. Rocha is the George J. Klir Professor of Systems Science at the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science, Binghamton University. He has been director of the NSF-NRT Complex Networks and Systems graduate Program in Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. He is also director of the Center for Social and Biomedical Complexity, between Binghamton University and Indiana University, Bloomington, a Fulbright Scholar, and Principal Investigator at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, Portugal. His research is on complex systems and networks, computational and systems biology, biomedical complexity and digital health, and computational intelligence.
Sara Imari Walker is an American theoretical physicist and astrobiologist with research interests in the origins of life, astrobiology, physics of life, emergence, complex and dynamical systems, and artificial life. Walker is deputy director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University (ASU), associate director of the ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems and an associate professor at ASU. She is a co-founder of the astrobiology social network SAGANet, and on the board of directors for Blue Marble Space, a nonprofit education and science organization. As a science communicator, she is a frequent guest on podcasts and series, such as Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman.
David Krakauer is an American evolutionary biologist. He is the president and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute.
Jean Marie Carlson is a professor of complexity at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She studies robustness and feedback in highly connected complex systems, which have applications in a variety of areas including earthquakes, wildfires and neuroscience.
Michelle Girvan is an American physicist and network scientist whose research combines methods from dynamical systems, graph theory, and statistical mechanics and applies them to problems including epidemiology, gene regulation, and the study of Information cascades. She is one of the namesakes of the Girvan–Newman algorithm, used to detect community structure in complex systems.
Erica Jen was an American applied mathematician. She was a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory, a faculty member at the University of Southern California, and a scientific director and faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute.
