Christopher Gale Langton (born 1948/49) is an American computer scientist and one of the founders of the field of artificial life.

[1] He coined the term in the late 1980s[2] when he organized the first "Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems" (otherwise known as Artificial Life I) at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1987.

[3] Following his time at Los Alamos, Langton joined the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), to continue his research on artificial life.

[4] Langton made numerous contributions to the field of artificial life, both in terms of simulation and computational models of given problems and to philosophical issues.

Inspired by ideas coming from physics, particularly phase transitions, he developed several key concepts and quantitative measures for cellular automata and suggested that critical points separating order from disorder could play a very important role in shaping complex systems, particularly in biology.