Distinguished Lectures are delivered by outstanding scientists and academicians. They bring to the centre their vision and their pathbreaking research.
Past Lectures
Giorgio Parisi (Sapienza University, Rome, Italy)
16 December 2021, 14:00 to 16:00
Onine
Giorgio Parisi is an Italian theoretical physicist, whose research has focused on quantum field theory, statistical mechanics and complex systems. His best known contributions are the QCD evolution equations for parton densities, obtained with Guido Altarelli, known as the Altarelli–Parisi or DGLAP...more
John Wettlaufer (Yale University, USA & Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, Sweden)
02 November 2021, 18:00 to 19:30
Livestream via the ICTS YouTube channel
Abstract: As Sir Charles Frank said "Physics is not just Concerning the Nature of Things, But Concerning the Interconnectedness of all the Natures of Things”, which encapsulates an overarching theme of the 2021 Prize. I provide a scientific overview of this year’s prize, colored partly by my role...more
Joel Lebowitz (Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA)
13 July 2021, 19:30 to 21:00
Online
Abstract: In this talk I will focus on describing, in a qualitative way, the reason statistical mechanics is able to predict, with great certainty, behavior of macroscopic systems, both in equilibrium and out of it. I will relate this to the fact that this behaviour is typical for systems...more
David Eisenbud (Director, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, and Professor of Mathematics, UC Berkeley)
13 December 2019, 16:00 to 17:00
Madhava Lecture Hall, ICTS-TIFR, Bengaluru
In this talk, aimed at non-specialists, I’ll describe the geometric questions in the 19th century that led to the geometric theory of residual intersections, from oddities such as “How many conics in the plane are tangent to 5 given conics?” to central topics such as the Riemann-Roch theorem and...more
Richard M. Karp (Professor Emeritus, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley)
18 October 2019, 15:30 to 16:45
Chandrasekhar Auditorium, 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
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
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
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
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
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

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