The SantaFeInstitute was founded in 1984 by a group of physicists, economists, biologists, computer scientists, and other scientists who realized that the things they were studying were similar in internal organization, dynamics, and structure. This relatively new interdisciplinary field, variously called "complex systems" and "complexity" in the press, is a way of thinking about natural, social and artificial systems that are composed of many simple components, interacting with one another according to simple rules, but which give rise to complex and unexpected EmergentBehavior.

There are tight academic and personal links between SFI and the CenterForTheStudyOfComplexSystems at the University of Michigan.

See http://www.santafe.edu

The research being carried out at SFI is documented in the book ''Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos'', by M. Mitchell Waldrop (ISBN:0671872346). Quote: This is a book about the science of ''complexity'' — a subject that's still so new and so wide-ranging that nobody knows quite how to define it, or even where its boundaries lie.

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CategoryEmergence