ICTP Colloquia This Week

ICTP is pleased to announce that there will be two ICTP Colloquia this week in the Budinich Lecture Hall, Leonardo Building, both starting at 16:30 and open to all. The colloquia will be livestreamed. Light refreshments will be served after both lectures.

Wednesday 1 March 2017: "Fundamental Lessons From String Theory" by Cumrun Vafa

Professor Vafa will review some of the lessons string theory has taught us about the fundamental laws of nature. Duality symmetries discovered in string theory play a key role.

Cumrun Vafa is a theoretical physicist whose primary area of research is string theory. He is the Donner Professor of Science in the Department of Physics at Harvard University. He won ICTP’s Dirac Medal in 2008 along with Juan Maldacena and Joseph Polchinski for fundamental contributions to superstring theory. In 2017, he received the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, together with Polchinski and Andrew Strominger, for transformative advances in quantum field theory, string theory, and quantum gravity. Vafa is a member of ICTP’s Scientific Council.

Read the full abstract of the talk.

Thursday 2 March 2017: "Irreducible Representations of the Higher Heisenberg Relation and Pati-Salam Model Coupled to Gravity" by Alain Connes

Professor Connes will discuss how a problem purely motivated by how geometry emerges from the quantum formalism gives rise to a slightly noncommutative structure and a spectral model of gravity coupled with matter which fits with experimental knowledge.

French mathematician Alain Connes is a professor at the Collège de France, IHES, and a Distinguished Professor at Ohio State University, USA. He is the recipient of mathematics’ top award, the Fields Medal (1982), as well as the Crafoord Prize (2001).

Read the full abstract of the talk.