Presidential Lectures

The mighty water molecule is responsible for much of what we know about climate and climate change, and even more of what we don’t know. In this lecture, Bjorn B. Stevens discusses the molecule’s short sojourn to the atmosphere, during which it helps to create the world as we know it.

This lecture presented by Brian J. Soden outlines our understanding of the main feedback processes in the climate system and how they impact both the magnitude of future changes in Earth’s climate and the uncertainty in our predictions of these changes.

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.

Some 90 tropical cyclones develop each year. In this lecture, Professor Kerry Emanuel will review the theory of tropical cyclones and how it informs observed variability. He will also discuss how these storms may have important feedbacks on such phenomena as El Niño-Southern Oscillation and global climate change.

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.

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?