Distinguished Lectures are delivered by outstanding scientists and academicians. They bring to the centre their vision and their pathbreaking research.
Past Lectures
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
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
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
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
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

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