Distinguished Lectures are delivered by outstanding scientists and academicians. They bring to the centre their vision and their pathbreaking research.
Past Lectures
Sarah Otto (University of British Columbia, Canada)
16 February 2024, 14:00 to 15:00
Madhava Lecture Hall, ICTS, Bengaluru
Title: The Evolutionary Enigma of Sex Abstract: Understanding the selective forces maintaining sexual reproduction has been a long-standing question in evolutionary biology. The near universality of sex, in the face of its many costs, has been touted as one of the biggest open questions in the...more
Alexander Migdal (New York University, Abu Dhabi, UAE)
19 December 2023, 16:00 to 17:00
Ramanujan Lecture Hall, ICTS Bengaluru
Title: Exact Solution Of Decaying Turbulence Abstract: We have found an infinite dimensional manifold of exact solutions of the Navier-Stokes loop equation for the Wilson loop in decaying Turbulence in arbitrary dimension $d >2$. This solution family is equivalent to a fractal curve in complex...more
Eduardo H Fradkin (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
27 September 2023, 16:00 to 17:00
Ramanujan Lecture Hall, ICTS
Duality has a long history in physics going back to the electromagnetic symmetry discovered by Dirac in 1931 and to the duality symmetry of the two-dimensional Ising model of statistical mechanics discovered by Kramers and Wannier in 1941. By now there are many extensions and generalizations of...more
David R. Nelson (Lyman Laboratory of Physics, Harvard University)
18 August 2023, 15:30 to 17:00
Ramanujan Lecture Hall, ICTS
Title : Statistical Mechanics of Mutilated Sheets and Shells Abstract : Understanding deformations of macroscopic thin plates and shells has a long and rich history, culminating with the Foeppl-von Karman equations in 1904, a precursor of general relativity characterized by a dimensionless coupling...more
Carlton M. Caves (University of New Mexico, USA)
19 July 2023, 16:00 to 17:00
Ramanujan Lecture Hall, ICTS Bengaluru
Title: A Century after Heisenberg: Discovering the World of Simultaneous Measurements of Noncommuting Observables. Abstract: One hundred years after Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the question of how to make simultaneous measurements of noncommuting observables lingers. I will survey one...more
Nick Kaiser (Département de Physique, ENS Paris)
10 May 2023, 16:00 to 17:00
Ramanujan Lecture Hall
Title : The History of Gravitational Lensing in Cosmology Abstract : In this talk I review the development of gravitational lensing in cosmology - a subject which is entering a "golden age" with the advent of Euclid and LSST. I start with Newton, who, it seems, understood light deflection but didn'...more
Ofer Zeitouni (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel & New York University, USA)
05 January 2023, 15:30 to 16:30
Ramanujan Lecture Hall
Title: The ubiquity of logarithmically correlated fields and their extremes. Abstract : Logarithmically correlated fields (LCF) are random fields that exhibit a certain type of long range correlation. In the last two decades, they were shown to pop up in a variety of models, such as certain PDE's,...more
Swapan Chattopadhyay (FNAL, USA & IISc, India)
15 November 2022, 17:30 to 18:30
Chandrasekhar Auditorium
Abstract: Stochastic phase space cooling using microwave techniques in the GHz frequency range have been employed historically in particle colliders, leading to ground-breaking discoveries. ‘Cooling’ increases the likelihood of observing rare physics events. The first important advance --...more
William A. Goddard III (California Institute of Technology, USA)
11 October 2022, 16:00 to 17:00
Ramanujan Lecture Hall
Abstract: G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) detect molecules outside the cell (say Morphine) to open the G protein (GP) bound inside the cell to release a GDP that exchanges with GTP to signal a response inside the cell (relieves pain in this case). GPCR agonists include odors, tastants,...more
Arindam Ghosh (Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru)
28 September 2022, 15:30 to 17:30
Ramanujan Lecture Hall, ICTS-TIFR, Bengaluru
Abstract: It is nearly twenty years since one atomic layer of carbon, which we call graphene, was separated from graphite and shown that it could lead to a new generation of electronic field-effect transistors. Prof. Arindam Ghosh will talk about how the unique fundamental physics of graphene and...more

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