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
Ramanujan: The inspirational story and a glimpse of his mathematics
Ken Ono (Emory university)
17 December 2015, 16:00 to 17:00
Chandrasekhar Auditorium, ICTS, Bangalore
Srinivasa Ramanujan is one of the most enigmatic figures in the history of mathematics. He was a self-trained amateur mathematician whose ideas befuddled the accumulated wisdom of western European mathematicians in the early 20th century. His legacy has played a central role in the development of...more
Time's Arrow and Entropy: Classical and Quantum
Joel Lebowitz (Rutgers University, USA)
10 November 2015, 16:00 to 17:00
Ramanujan Lecture Hall, ICTS campus
One of the most intriguing questions in science is that of the mysterious arrow of time: while the basic laws of physics look the same whether time runs forward or backward, the world we live in does not. For example, a movie of the motion of atoms looks equally correct if you run it forward or in...more
Astronomy, Big Data and Human Capital Development
Bernard Fanaroff (South African Square Kilometre Array)
16 October 2015, 16:30 to 17:30
Chandrashekhar Auditorium, ICTS Bangalore
South Africa has invested in the development of a large and vibrant radio astronomy community by building a greenfield observatory, protecting it by law from radio frequency interference, designing and building the MeerKAT array and participating very actively in the design of the Square Kilometre...more
Particles, Gravity and Strings
Nima Arkani-Hamed (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA), Ashoke Sen (Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad), Nathan Seiberg (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA), Andrew Strominger (Harvard University, USA) and Cumrun Vafa (Harvard University, USA)
27 June 2015, 11:00 to 12:00
Christ University Auditorium, Bangalore
The Public Outreach Event is scheduled on 27th June 2015. The morning interactive session with students will include talks by: Nima Arkani-Hamed, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Ashoke Sen, Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad. The afternoon session will include public lectures by...more
Poetry, Drumming, and Mathematics
Manjul Bhargava (Princeton University)
20 June 2015, 17:30 to 18:30
Christ University Auditorium, Bangalore
Mathematics pervades all the sciences, but it also lies at the heart of a number of fields in the humanities. Two such important subjects which go back to ancient times are linguistics and music. In fact, many of the modern mathematical tools used in probability and combinatorics, and tools applied...more
The Spin on Electronics
Stuart Parkin (IBM Fellow and Director Max Planck Institute for Microstructure Physics)
07 October 2014, 16:30 to 17:30
Homi Bhabha Auditorium, TIFR, Mumbai
The charge on an electron is commonly used in conventional electronics, unlike the spin degree of freedom. Using the spin is revolutionizing computing and storage.more
A Physicist's View of Biology
Boris Shraiman (Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara)
13 December 2013, 17:30 to 18:30
Faculty Hall, IISc, Bangalore
The interface of Biology and Physics is an exciting and rapidly developing frontier of science. This lecture will draw examples from the study of animal development and the study of evolution – two of the fundamental problems of Biology – to illustrate the sometimes unexpected ways in which...more
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

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