23 Facts About Stuart Kauffman

Stuart Alan Kauffman was born on September 28,1939 and is an American medical doctor, theoretical biologist, and complex systems researcher who studies the origin of life on Earth.

Stuart Kauffman was a professor at the University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Calgary.

Stuart Kauffman is currently emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and affiliate faculty at the Institute for Systems Biology.

Stuart Kauffman has a number of awards including a MacArthur Fellowship and a Wiener Medal.

Stuart Kauffman is best known for arguing that the complexity of biological systems and organisms might result as much from self-organization and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from Darwinian natural selection, as discussed in his book Origins of Order.

Stuart Kauffman proposed the self-organized emergence of collectively autocatalytic sets of polymers, specifically peptides, for the origin of molecular reproduction, which have found experimental support.

Stuart Kauffman became known through his association with the Santa Fe Institute, where he was faculty in residence from 1986 to 1997, and through his work on models in various areas of biology.

In 1996, with Ernst and Young, Stuart Kauffman started BiosGroup, a Santa Fe, New Mexico-based for-profit company that applied complex systems methodology to business problems.

From 2005 to 2009 Stuart Kauffman held a joint appointment at the University of Calgary in biological sciences, physics, and astronomy.

Stuart Kauffman was an adjunct professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Calgary.

Stuart Kauffman was an iCORE chair and the director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics.

Stuart Kauffman was invited to help launch the Science and Religion initiative at Harvard Divinity School; serving as visiting professor in 2009.

In January 2009 Stuart Kauffman became a Finland Distinguished Professor at Tampere University of Technology, Department of Signal Processing.

In January 2010 Stuart Kauffman joined the University of Vermont faculty where he continued his work for two years with UVM's Complex Systems Center.

From early 2011 to April 2013, Stuart Kauffman was a regular contributor to the NPR Blog 13.7, Cosmos and Culture, with topics ranging from the life sciences, systems biology, and medicine, to spirituality, economics, and the law.

Stuart Kauffman holds an Honorary Degree in Science from the University of Louvain ; Stuart Kauffman was awarded the Norbert Wiener Memorial Gold Medal for Cybernetics in 1973, the Gold Medal of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome in 1990, the Trotter Prize for Information and Complexity in 2001, and the Herbert Simon award for Complex Systems in 2013.

Stuart Kauffman became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2009.

Stuart Kauffman is best known for arguing that the complexity of biological systems and organisms might result as much from self-organization and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from Darwinian natural selection in three areas of evolutionary biology, namely population dynamics, molecular evolution, and morphogenesis.

Some biologists and physicists working in Stuart Kauffman's area have questioned his claims about self-organization and evolution.

Borrowing from spin glass models in physics, Stuart Kauffman invented "N-K" fitness landscapes, which have found applications in biology and economics.

Stuart Kauffman published on this topic in his paper "Answering Descartes: beyond Turing".

Stuart Kauffman has contributed to the emerging field of cumulative technological evolution by introducing a mathematics of the adjacent possible.

Stuart Kauffman has published over 350 articles and 6 books: The Origins of Order, At Home in the Universe, Investigations, Reinventing the Sacred, Humanity in a Creative Universe, and A World Beyond Physics.