Simons Foundation

This talk describes experimental progress toward controlling quantum mechanical coherence and entanglement in a solid-state environment.

Nima Arkani-Hamed's research has shown how the extreme weakness of gravity, relative to other forces of nature, might be explained by the existence of extra dimensions of space, and how the structure of comparatively low-energy physics is constrained within the context of string theory.

While significant progress has been made on key cosmological questions, many remain unanswered: What happened during the first moments of the big bang? What is dark energy? What were the properties of the first stars?

A talk on recent advances in methods and instrumentation that combine genetically encoded molecular sensors, optical imaging and virtual-reality systems to measure neural-circuit dynamics in the mouse brain during virtual navigation and decision making.

Most sensory stimuli in the natural world exhibit strong statistical regularities. A proposed general principle of sensory neuroscience is that the brain’s circuitry is designed to take advantage of these statistical regularities.

The mind and brain can be thought of as computational systems — but what kinds of computations do they carry out, and what kinds of mathematics can best characterize these computations? Josh Tenenbaum attempts to answer these questions through the integration of disparate branches of mathematics and paradigms of computation.

The talk describes (dis)similarity distances between pairs of two-dimensional surfaces (embedded in three-dimensional space) that use both local structures and global information in the surfaces.

Probability theory was devised in order to understand gambling, but now is the underpinning of statistics, without which we would be clueless in our complex society.  Yet probability itself is a mysterious quantity, hard to define, and awkward for our human intuition to cope with.  Does it even exist, except in our minds?

Genetics tells us that abnormal synaptic and nuclear proteins are often at the root of major neuropsychiatric disorders. Autism, a prominent and often debilitating disorder of the brain, has been traced to small contributions of hundreds of genes, creating a formidable challenge for those interested in exploring pathophysiology and possible therapeutic interventions.

Andrei Okounkov presents a talk about the law of large numbers, in its various manifestations. This is a real cornerstone of probability, which states that a random system of a very large size is typically not random: its deterministic state is the one that has the largest probability to occur.

The mathematical concept of 'holonomy' was gradually developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in a number of different contexts, and it was found to lie at the base of many everyday phenomena. Anyone who has ever tried to control the orientation of a 3-dimensional object on a computer screen using a trackball...

How do stem cells retain their remarkable capacity to regenerate tissue? Why are some stem cells, such as those of the skin, so extraordinarily good at making new tissue? And why are other stem cells, such as those of the heart and brain, more limited in their potential? These are some of the many questions that fascinate Rockefeller University’s Rebecca C. Lancefield Professor Elaine Fuchs, Ph.D.

As the gateway to human communication, the sense of hearing is of enormous importance in our lives.  Research on hearing has recently been revolutionized by the demonstration that the ear is not simply a passive receiver for sound, but also an amplifier that augments, filters, and compresses its inputs.

In this talk, Mike Shelley discusses problems in fluid-structure interaction ranging from the macroscopic, i.e. flapping of flags and bending of tree leaves, to the micro – collective behaviors of micro-organisms and the transport of subcellular structures.

Thought experiments have played an important role in figuring out the laws of physics. For the unification of quantum mechanics and gravity, where the phenomena take place in extreme regimes, they are even more crucial. Hawking’s 1976 paper “Breakdown of Predictability in Gravitational Collapse” presented one of the great thought experiments in the history of physics, arguing that black holes destroy information in a way that requires a modification of the laws of quantum mechanics. Skeptics for years failed to poke holes in Hawking’s argument, but concluded that if quantum mechanics is to be saved then our understanding of spacetime must break down in a radical way.

In biological systems, there are striking examples where complicated structures (i.e., the bacterial ribosome) can spontaneously assemble, driven by specific interactions between the components. But how can systems be designed to have this property? Recent technological  advances have created the opportunity for making technologically relevant systems that self assemble, using strands of DNA or objects coated with DNA. We will use these systems as inspiration to formulate theoretical models to understand how self assembly works in these systems, through theory, numerical simulation and experiment — and start to speculate as to whether resulting principles might be useful for unravelling the rules of biological self-assembly.