The enormous amount of information that is now available about cities and the people who live in them offers intriguing opportunities for better understanding human behavior. That understanding can be applied to optimize urban policy and operations. Steven Koonin will discuss examples of and prospects for gaining insight into human behavior within the context of work at...
Simulating quantum mechanics on classical computers appears at first to require exponential computational resources, yet at the same time rapid progress is being made in accurate simulations of the quantum properties of realistic materials. How is this discrepancy resolved?
Thursday, October 23rd – Friday, October 24th, 2014 Download the 2014 Annual Meeting booklet (PDF). The Simons Foundation Division of Mathematics and Physical Sciences (MPS) held its second Annual Meeting on October 23 and 24, 2014. MPS-supported scientists were invited to the foundation to meet, share ideas and hear talks representing the spectrum of MPS-supported...
The MoSAIC Festival includes a variety of hands-on workshops, lectures, a mathematical art exhibit, short films and an area for informal exchange. It is designed to be easily accessible to audiences high-school age and up.
In this lecture, Dan Littman will describe how intestinal commensal bacteria shape functions of immune system cells that prevent invasion by pathogenic microbes but can also contribute to systemic inflammation.
In this lecture, Mauro Maggioni will discuss a family of ideas, algorithms and results for learning from high-dimensional data.
MEG and EEG Signals and Their Sources: Insights from Physics, Physiology and Anatomy Matti Hamalainen, Massachusetts General Hospital Understanding the biophysics and physiology underlying the generation of detectable extracranial magnetic fields and electric potentials is of prime importance for correct interpretation of magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG) data. Matti Hamalainen will discuss the neural sources of...
In this talk, Christian Borgs will give an introduction to belief propagation, discuss how the accuracy of belief propagation has been rigorously established, and present recent applications to systems biology.
A day to explore Maxim Kontsevich's contributions to the field of mathematics.
Topology, the "rubber sheet geometry", studies properties that do not change when objects are pulled and stretched. Accepting somewhat fuzzy input, it is the part of mathematics typically applied when qualitative conclusions are reached. However, it has a quantitative aspect important in understanding singularities, and potentially, high-dimensional noisy data and aspects of large-scale geometry of networks. Prof. Weinberger will discuss a variety of phenomena that arise or are illuminated by tracking of the complexity of geometric constructions.
