Public Lectures
At ICTS, science outreach for school and college students and civic society in general is taken very seriously. ICTS regularly organizes public lectures given by eminent visitors. Public lectures bring exciting new developments in science to the general public and play an important role in engaging students and civic society at large on issues of modern science.
Past Lectures
The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge
Robbert Dijkgraaf (IAS, Princeton)
07 January 2018, 16:00 to 18:00
Main Auditorium, Christ University, Bangalore
In his classic essay The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge , Abraham Flexner, the founding director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the man who helped bring Albert Einstein to the United States, describes a great paradox of scientific research. The search for answers to deep...more
Deciphering the workings of molecules, building blocks of life, with the electron microscope
Joachim Frank (Columbia University, New York, USA)
01 November 2017, 16:00 to 17:30
Chandrasekhar Auditorium, ICTS, Bangalore
We stand at the culmination of a technological development that lasted for decades, and went largely unnoticed until recently. It involved many innovations of instrumentation, of sample preparation, and computer processing methods for which this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded. As...more
What are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?
John Ellis ( King's College, London, UK)
08 June 2017, 16:30 to 18:00
Chandrasekhar Auditorium, ICTS, Bangalore
Particle physicists are trying to answer these questions, posed by the artist Paul Gauguin in a famous painting. The discovery of the Higgs boson apparently completes our understanding of the structure of matter, and may hold clues to where we come from and where we are going. But there are other...more
Remarkable lives and legacy of Sofia Kovalevskaya and Emmy Noether
Leon Takhtajan (Stony Brook University, NY)
10 January 2017, 16:00 to 17:00
Chandrasekhar Auditorium, ICTS, Bengaluru
Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya (1850-1891), was the greatest woman mathematician of the XIXth century. She got her PhD at University of Göttingen, Germany (1874) under Karl Weierstrass and made original contributions to analysis, partial differential equations and mechanics. Sofia Kovalevskaya was...more
Whispers from Space: the Detection of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
Stanley Whitcomb (California Institute of Technology)
07 April 2016, 17:30 to 18:30
Chandrasekhar Auditorium, ICTS, Bangalore
One of the early consequences of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity was the prediction of gravitational waves, but because of their weak effect on matter, they eluded direct detection for nearly a century. On 11 February 2016, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (“LIGO”)...more
Scaling of Electronic Devices: From the Vacuum Tube to a Single-Molecule Diode
Latha Venkataraman (Columbia University)
28 January 2016, 16:30 to 17:30
Chandrasekhar Auditorium, ICTS, Bangalore
Most electronic devices made today use transistors as their smallest functional building blocks. Since their invention in the 1940s, their size has shrunk from the macroscopic scale to the current day transistor which has a characteristic dimension under twenty nanometers. Further miniaturization...more
Mathematics of Turbulent Flows: A Million Dollar Problem!
Edriss S. Titi (Texas A&M University and Weizmann Institute of Science)
07 January 2016, 16:00 to 08 January 2016, 17:00
Ramanujan Lecture Hall, ICTS, Bangalore
Turbulence is a classical physical phenomenon that has been a great challenge to mathematicians, physicists, engineers and computational scientists. Chaos theory has been developed in the end of the last century to address similar phenomena that occur in a wide range of applied sciences, but the...more
Ramanujan: The inspirational story and a glimpse of his mathematics
Ken Ono (Emory university)
17 December 2015, 16:00 to 17:00
Chandrasekhar Auditorium, ICTS, Bangalore
Srinivasa Ramanujan is one of the most enigmatic figures in the history of mathematics. He was a self-trained amateur mathematician whose ideas befuddled the accumulated wisdom of western European mathematicians in the early 20th century. His legacy has played a central role in the development of...more
Time's Arrow and Entropy: Classical and Quantum
Joel Lebowitz (Rutgers University, USA)
10 November 2015, 16:00 to 17:00
Ramanujan Lecture Hall, ICTS campus
One of the most intriguing questions in science is that of the mysterious arrow of time: while the basic laws of physics look the same whether time runs forward or backward, the world we live in does not. For example, a movie of the motion of atoms looks equally correct if you run it forward or in...more
Astronomy, Big Data and Human Capital Development
Bernard Fanaroff (South African Square Kilometre Array)
16 October 2015, 16:30 to 17:30
Chandrashekhar Auditorium, ICTS Bangalore
South Africa has invested in the development of a large and vibrant radio astronomy community by building a greenfield observatory, protecting it by law from radio frequency interference, designing and building the MeerKAT array and participating very actively in the design of the Square Kilometre...more

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