Distinguished Lectures are delivered by outstanding scientists and academicians. They bring to the centre their vision and their pathbreaking research.
Past Lectures
J. Richard Bond (CITA, University of Toronto, Canada)
15 January 2019, 17:00 to 18:00
Ramanujan Lecture Hall, ICTS Bangalore
How can physicists be so audacious as to declare all we see, hear and feel is from gravitational instability of quantum fluctuations in ultra-early universe fields encoded in energy-density phonons? Answer: the data reveals it, most precisely by our Planck cosmic microwave background (CMB) team...more
Duncan Haldane (Sherman Fairchild University Professor of Physics, Princeton University, USA)
11 January 2019, 16:30 to 18:30
Ramanujan Lecture Hall, ICTS Bangalore
While the laws of quan tum mechanics have remained unchanged and have passed all tests for the last eighty-five years, new discoveries about the exotic states that they allow, “entanglement”, and ideas from quantum information theory, have greatly changed our perspective, and some believe that a “...more
Nalini Anantharaman (Institute for Advanced Study, University of Strasbourg, France)
03 January 2019, 16:00 to 17:00
Ramanujan Lecture Hall, ICTS-TIFR
A hundred years ago, Einstein wondered about a good description of the spectrum of disordered systems in the emerging quantum theory. Although a full mathematical answer is still missing, a lot of progress has been made to describe chaotic behavior of waves in quantum mechanics Download Postermore
Susan Coppersmith (University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin)
26 September 2018, 16:00 to 17:00
Ramanujan Lecture Hall, ICTS Bangalore
The steady increase in computational power of information processors over the past half-century has led to smart phones and the internet, changing commerce and our social lives. Up to now, the primary way that computational power has increased is that the electronic components have been made...more
Michael E. Peskin (SLAC, Stanford University)
17 April 2018, 16:00 to 17:30
Ramanujan Lecture Hall, ICTS Bangalore
Thirty-five years after it was postulated as a key component of the theory of weak interactions, the Higgs boson was discovered at the CERN Large Hadron Collider in 2012. Since that time, many decay modes of the Higgs boson have been observed, indicating couplings of the Higgs boson in good accord...more
Hirosi Ooguri (Fred Kavli Professor of Theoretical Physics and Mathematics, Director of the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, Caltech; Principal Investigator, Kavli IPMU, The University of Tokyo and President, Aspen Center for Physics)
15 January 2018, 16:00 to 17:30
Ramanujan Lecture Hall, ICTS Bangalore
General relativity and quantum mechanics were crowning achievements of physics in the 20th century, and their unification has been left as our homework in the 21st century. Superstring theory is our best candidate for the unification. Although predictions of the theory are typically at extremely...more
David Gross (KITP - University of California, Santa Barbara)
08 January 2018, 09:00 to 10:30
Ramanujan Lecture Hall, ICTS, Bengaluru
Abstract : A perspective on large N theories: their role in quantum field theory, in gauge-gravity dualities and an introduction to the SYK model. This lecture is a part of Kavli Asian Winter School (KAWS) on Strings, Particles and Cosmology 2018more
Philip Candelas FRS (Rouse-Ball Professor of Mathematics, Mathematical Institute, Univ. of Oxford, UK)
07 April 2017, 16:00 to 17:00
Ramanujan Lecture Hall, ICTS, Bangalore
Calabi-Yau manifolds play an important role in physics owing to the part they play in passing from a 10-dimensional string theory vacuum to the observed world of four dimensions. The process of calculating the four - dimensional quantities usually involves a calculation of certain period integrals...more
Pierre Hohenberg (New York University)
28 December 2016, 16:00 to 17:00
ICTS campus, Bengaluru
In this talk we propose a new definition of science based on the distinction between the activity of scientists and the product of that activity: the former is denoted (lower-case) science and the latter (upper-case) Science. These definitions are intended to clarify the nature of scientific...more
M.S.Narasimhan (NMI, Indian Institute of Science and TIFR-CAM, Bangalore)
20 December 2016, 16:00 to 17:00
Ramanujan Lecture Hall, ICTS, Bangalore
The theory of holomorphic vector bundles on a compact Riemann surface is a vast "non-abelian" generalisation of the classical theory of the Jacobian variety. The Jacobian, a complex torus, arose in the work of Abel, Jacobi and Riemann on abelian integrals on compact Riemann surfaces. The non-...more

Pages