ICTS 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
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
Particles, Gravity and Strings
Nima Arkani-Hamed (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA), Ashoke Sen (Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad), Nathan Seiberg (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA), Andrew Strominger (Harvard University, USA) and Cumrun Vafa (Harvard University, USA)
27 June 2015, 11:00 to 12:00
Christ University Auditorium, Bangalore
The Public Outreach Event is scheduled on 27th June 2015. The morning interactive session with students will include talks by: Nima Arkani-Hamed, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Ashoke Sen, Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad. The afternoon session will include public lectures by...more
Poetry, Drumming, and Mathematics
Manjul Bhargava (Princeton University)
20 June 2015, 17:30 to 18:30
Christ University Auditorium, Bangalore
Mathematics pervades all the sciences, but it also lies at the heart of a number of fields in the humanities. Two such important subjects which go back to ancient times are linguistics and music. In fact, many of the modern mathematical tools used in probability and combinatorics, and tools applied...more

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