Presidential Lectures

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?

Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been used to identify consistent functional patterns in neurotypical individuals, as well as changes in neurologic and psychiatric diseases.

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.

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.