Distinguished Lectures
Distinguished Lectures are delivered by outstanding scientists and academicians. They bring to the centre their vision and their pathbreaking research.
Upcoming Lectures
Computational Complexity in Theory and in Practice
Richard M. Karp (Professor Emeritus, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley)
18 October 2019, 15:30 to 16:45
Ramanujan Lecture Hall, ICTS-TIFR, Bengaluru
The quest for efficient algorithms is central both to theoretical computer science and to the practice of computing, but the metrics used in the two areas are different: theoreticians usually evaluate algorithms by their worst-case performance, whereas practitioners are more interested in empirical...more
Past Lectures
Lyapunov exponents, from the 1960's to the 2020's
Marcelo Viana (IMPA, Brazil)
24 September 2019, 16:00 to 17:30
Ramanujan Lecture Hall
The ergodic theory of Lyapunov exponents, initiated by the work of Furstenberg and Kesten at the dawn of the 1960s, has been a remarkably active field of mathematics over all these decades and, through the works of Oseledets, Pesin and many, many others, found extremely important applications in...more
Falling/rising styles of gravity/buoyancy-driven disks
Jacques Magnaudet (CNRS & University of Toulouse, France)
04 September 2019, 15:00 to 16:00
Ramanujan Lecture Hall, ICTS Bangalore
Rigid disks falling under the effect of gravity, such as coins in water or confettis in air, may exhibit a large variety of paths: they may fall vertically, follow planar zigzags, tumble, etc. The selection of these paths depends on the disk’s inertia with respect to the surrounding fluid, on its...more
The Making of High-Precision Gravitational Waves
Alessandra Buonanno (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute), Germany)
19 August 2019, 16:30 to 18:00
Ramanujan Lecture Hall
Solving the two-body problem in General Relativity has been crucial in observing gravitational waves from binary systems composed of black holes and neutron stars, and inferring their astrophysical and cosmological properties. I will review the theoretical groundwork that has enabled these major...more
A Golden Age in Physics: Heavy Ion Physics at High Energies
Rob Pisarski (Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA)
10 April 2019, 17:00 to 18:00
Ramanujan Lecture Hall, ICTS Bangalore
I will give a pedagogical introduction to the modern theory of nuclear forces, Quantum Chromo Dynamics (QCD), a theory of quarks and gluons. I will also discuss the history and results from the collisions of heavy ions at ultra relativistic energies, which appears to have created a new phase of...more
Three lectures on machine learning
Sanjeev Arora (Princeton University and Institute for Advanced Study, USA)
12 February 2019 to 13 February 2019
Ramanujan Lecture Hall, ICTS Bangalore
Lecture 1 : Mathematics of Machine Learning: An introduction Date & Tim e: Tuesday, 12 February, 11:30 Abstract : Machine learning is the sub-field of computer science concerned with creating programs and machines that can improve from experience and interaction. It relies upon mathematical...more
Quantum Inflation in the Planck Era and Beyond
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
Topological Quantum Matter, Entanglement, and a "Second Quantum Revolution"
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
Topics in quantum chaos (An Infosys Prize Lecture)
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
From bits to qubits: a quantum leap for computers
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
Mysteries of the Higgs Boson
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

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