Public Lectures | 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
Strings and the Magic of Extra Dimensions
Cumrun Vafa (Harvard University, MA)
05 June 2013, 17:30 to 18:30
Faculty Hall, IISc, Bangalore
The extra dimensions of string theory which were originally viewed as a source of embarrassment for the theory, have proven to be instrumental in resolving a number of puzzles associated with 3+1 dimensional physics. I discuss examples of this in the context of black holes, gauge theory and...more
Quantum Reality
Sankar Das Sarma (University of Maryland, USA)
12 December 2012, 17:00 to 18:00
Homi Bhabha Auditorium, TIFR, Mumbai
Quantum mechanics, the underlying microscopic theory of our existence governing the behavior of the physical world, is the crowning success of human intellect. It is astonishingly successful-- no experiment contradicts the predictions of the theory, and the theory has been explicitly verified to be...more
The Architecture of Biological Complexity
Sydney Brenner (Salk Institute for Biological Sciences, San Diego, USA)
18 October 2012, 18:00 to 19:00
J.N. Tata Auditotium, IISc, Bangalore
In his paper "On Computable Numbers" Turing proposed a way of performing mechanical procedures on binary inputs to test whether mathematical functions could be computed from a set of simple rules. The Turing machine, as it came to be called, worked on a tape which it could move in both directions...more
The Ramanujan Conjecture and some diophantine equations (IISc, Bangalore)
Peter Sarnak (Princeton University and IAS, Princeton)
25 May 2012, 16:00 to 17:00
Faculty Hall, IISc, Bangalore
One of Ramanujan's most influential conjectures concerns the magnitude of the Fourier Coefficients of a modular form. These were made on the basis of his calculations as well as a far-reaching insight as to their usefulness in the study of some diophantine problems. Today his original Conjecture is...more
The Ramanujan Conjecture and some diophantine equations (TIFR, Mumbai)
Peter Sarnak (Princeton University and IAS, Princeton)
18 May 2012, 16:00 to 17:00
AG 66, TIFR, Mumbai
One of Ramanujan's most influential conjectures concerns the magnitude of the Fourier Coefficients of a modular form. These were made on the basis of his calculations as well as a far-reaching insight as to their usefulness in the study of some diophantine problems. Today his original Conjecture is...more
When Mathematicians use Geometry to Cut Cloth A tale from the 18th to the 21st Century
Etienne Ghys (Ecole Normale Superieure Lyon, France)
13 April 2012, 16:00 to 17:00
Homi Bhabha Auditorium, TIFR, Mumbai
Some interesting questions about surfaces have been studied mathematically for centuries. For example, in 1772 Euler characterised the surfaces that can be covered with paper, allowing bending but not stretching, cutting or wrinkling. For cloth in place of paper, it would be a different question,...more
Structure and randomness in the prime numbers
Terence Tao (Department of Mathematics, UCLA)
23 February 2012, 16:00 to 17:00
AG 66, TIFR, Mumbai
"God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers" - Paul Erdos The prime numbers are a fascinating blend of both structure (for instance, almost all primes are odd) and randomness. It is widely believed that beyond the "obvious" structures in the...more
Solving Cubic Equations
Benedict Gross (George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Mathematics, Harvard University)
06 January 2012, 17:15 to 18:15
AG 66, TIFR, Mumbai
I will discuss a problem which has been central in number theory for several centuries – whether a cubic equation in the plane has infinitely many rational solutions.This led to a precise conjecture by Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer in the 1960s, and to some partial progress in the 1980s. More recently...more
The Universe Unravelled Comology, Gravitation and Elementary Particles
Kip S. Thorne (Caltech), J. Richard Bond (Caltech), P. James Peebles (Princeton University) and John Ellis (CERN)
13 December 2011, 14:00 to 15:00
Homi Bhabha Auditorium, TIFR, Mumbai
What are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? In the language of physics, these become: What is the structure of matter? How did the Universe evolve? How will it evolve in the future? John Wheeler's famous mantra, IT from BIT, envisaged the Universe as an information structure of BITs...more

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