Distinguished Lectures are delivered by outstanding scientists and academicians. They bring to the centre their vision and their pathbreaking research.
Past Lectures
Carlton M. Caves (University of New Mexico, USA)
19 July 2023, 16:00 to 17:00
Ramanujan Lecture Hall, ICTS Bengaluru
Title: A Century after Heisenberg: Discovering the World of Simultaneous Measurements of Noncommuting Observables. Abstract: One hundred years after Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the question of how to make simultaneous measurements of noncommuting observables lingers. I will survey one...more
Nick Kaiser (Département de Physique, ENS Paris)
10 May 2023, 16:00 to 17:00
Ramanujan Lecture Hall
Title : The History of Gravitational Lensing in Cosmology Abstract : In this talk I review the development of gravitational lensing in cosmology - a subject which is entering a "golden age" with the advent of Euclid and LSST. I start with Newton, who, it seems, understood light deflection but didn'...more
Ofer Zeitouni (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel & New York University, USA)
05 January 2023, 15:30 to 16:30
Ramanujan Lecture Hall
Title: The ubiquity of logarithmically correlated fields and their extremes. Abstract : Logarithmically correlated fields (LCF) are random fields that exhibit a certain type of long range correlation. In the last two decades, they were shown to pop up in a variety of models, such as certain PDE's,...more
Swapan Chattopadhyay (FNAL, USA & IISc, India)
15 November 2022, 17:30 to 18:30
Chandrasekhar Auditorium
Abstract: Stochastic phase space cooling using microwave techniques in the GHz frequency range have been employed historically in particle colliders, leading to ground-breaking discoveries. ‘Cooling’ increases the likelihood of observing rare physics events. The first important advance --...more
William A. Goddard III (California Institute of Technology, USA)
11 October 2022, 16:00 to 17:00
Ramanujan Lecture Hall
Abstract: G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) detect molecules outside the cell (say Morphine) to open the G protein (GP) bound inside the cell to release a GDP that exchanges with GTP to signal a response inside the cell (relieves pain in this case). GPCR agonists include odors, tastants,...more
Arindam Ghosh (Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru)
28 September 2022, 15:30 to 17:30
Ramanujan Lecture Hall, ICTS-TIFR, Bengaluru
Abstract: It is nearly twenty years since one atomic layer of carbon, which we call graphene, was separated from graphite and shown that it could lead to a new generation of electronic field-effect transistors. Prof. Arindam Ghosh will talk about how the unique fundamental physics of graphene and...more
Giorgio Parisi (Sapienza University, Rome, Italy)
16 December 2021, 14:00 to 16:00
Online
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

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