Anthony J.Leggett was born in London,England in March 1938.He attended Balliol College,Oxford where he majored in Literae Humaniores (classical languages and literature,philosophy and Greco-Roman history),and thereafter Merton College, Oxford where he took a second undergraduate degree in Physics.He completed a D.Phil.(Ph.D.) degree in theoretical physics under the supervision of D.ter Haar. In 1983 he became John D.and Catherine T. Macarthur Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,a position he currently holds.He was knighted (KBE) by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004 "for services to physics." In 2006 he was also appointed to the Mike and Ophelia Lazaridis Distinguished Research Chair at the University of Waterloo.
His main research interests lie in condensed matter physics,particularly high-temperature superconductivity,glasses and ultracold atomic gases,and the foundations of quantum mechanics. He is widely recognized as a world leader in the theory of low-temperature physics, and his pioneering work on superfluidity was recognized by the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics. He has shaped the theoretical understanding of normal and superfluid helium liquids and strongly coupled superfluids. He set directions for research in the quantum physics of macroscopic dissipative systems and use of condensed systems to test the foundations of quantum mechanics.
Date and Venue : 21:00 Hrs on 2nd October - ICSR
Title of the Talk: Why can't time run backwards?
We can all tell when a movie of some everyday event,such as a kettle boiling or a glass shattering,is run backwards.Similarly,we all feel that we can remember the past and affect the future,not vice versa.So there is a very clear "arrow" (direction) of time built into our interpretation of our everyday experience.Yet the fundamental microscopic laws of physics,be they classical or quantum-mechanical,look exactly the same if the direction of time is reversed.So what is the origin of the "arrow" of time? This is one of the deepest questions in physics;I will review some relevant considerations,but do not pretend to give a complete answer.
Steven Weinberg holds the Josey Regental Chair in Science at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a member of the Physics and Astronomy Departments. He received his A. B. degree from Cornell, worked for a year at the Niels Bohr Insitute in Copenhagen, and received his Ph. D. from Princeton; he also holds honorary doctoral degrees from sixteen other universities, including Chicago, Columbia, McGill, Padua, Salamanca, and Yale. He taught at Columbia, Berkeley, M.I.T., and Harvard, where he was Higgins Professor of Physics, before coming to Texas in 1982.
His research on elementary particles and cosmology has been honored with numerous prizes and awards, including in 1979 the Nobel Prize in Physics and in 1991 the National Medal of Science. In 2004 he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal of the American Philosophical Society, with a citation that said he is "considered by many to be the preeminent theoretical physicist alive in the world today." He has been elected to the US National Academy of Sciences, Britain's Royal Society, and the Royal Irish Academy, as well as to the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.He is the author of over 300 articles and 12 books on elementary particle physics, cosmology, and other subjects. His prize-winning book, The First Three Minutes, is an introduction to cosmology for general readers, and has been translated into 22 foreign languages. His latest book, Cosmology, a graduate level treatise on modern cosmological research, has just been published . His articles for general readers appear from time to time in The New York Review, the Times Literary Supplement of London, and other periodicals.
Date and Venue : 21:00 Hrs on 1st October - ICSR
Title of the talk : The Uses of Astronomy
Adrian Bejan obtained his Ph.D. from MIT in 1975 and is arguably the foremost authority on Thermodynamics and Heat Transfer today. Currently he is the JA Jones Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Duke University. He is the inventor of the Constructal theory of Global Optimisation under local constraints. which attempts to explain the origin of shapes that arise in nature. It holds that flow architecture arises from maximization of flow access in time and in flow configurations that are free to morph. He has published more than 470 articles, 23 books and is among the most cited engineers in the world.
Title of the Talk – Introduction to Constructal Theory.
Date and Venue: 18:30hrs 3rd October ISCR Auditorium.
Ray Kurzweil has been described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS included Ray as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries.
As one of the leading inventors of our time, Ray was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Ray’s web site Kurzweil AI.net has over one million readers.
Among Ray’s many honors, he is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world's largest for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. And in 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame , established by the US Patent Office.
He has received fifteen honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents.
Ray has written five books, four of which have been national best sellers. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 best selling book on Amazon in science. Ray’s latest book, The Singularity is Near, was a New York Times best seller, and has been the #1 book on Amazon in both science and philosophy.
Title of the Talk:The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
Date and Venue: 16:30hrs 3rd October ICSR Auditrium
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Chemical Engineering Department
Robert S. Langer is one of 13 Institute Professors (the highest honor awarded to a faculty member) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Langer has written approximately 1,000 articles. He served as a member of the United States Food and Drug Administration’s SCIENCE Board, the FDA’s highest advisory board, from 1995 -- 2002 and as its Chairman from 1999-2002.
Dr. Langer has received over 160 major awards including the 2006 United States National Medal of Science; the Charles Stark Draper Prize, considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for engineers and the 2008 Millennium Prize, the world’s largest technology prize. He is the also the only engineer to receive the Gairdner Foundation International Award. In 1998, he received the Lemelson-MIT prize, the world’s largest prize for invention for being “one of history’s most prolific inventors in medicine.” In 1989 Dr. Langer was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and in 1992 he was elected to both the National Academy of Engineering and to the National Academy of Sciences. He is one of very few people ever elected to all three United States National Academies and the youngest in history (at age 43) to ever receive this distinction.
Forbes Magazine (1999) and Bio World (1990) have named Dr. Langer as one of the 25 most important individuals in biotechnology in the world. Discover Magazine (2002) named him as one of the 20 most important people in this area. Forbes Magazine (2002) selected Dr. Langer as one of the 15 innovators world wide who will reinvent our future. Time Magazine and CNN (2001) named Dr. Langer as one of the 100 most important people in America and one of the 18 top people in science or medicine in America. Parade Magazine (2004) selected Dr. Langer as one of 6 “Heroes whose research may save your life.” Dr. Langer has received honorary doctorates from Yale University, the ETH (Switzerland), the Technion (Israel), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), the Universite Catholique de Louvain (Belgium), the University of Liverpool (England), the University of Nottingham (England), Albany Medical College, the Pennsylvania State University, Northwestern University and Uppsala University (Sweden). He received his Bachelor’s Degree from Cornell University in 1970 and his Sc.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974, both in Chemical Engineering.
Date and Venue : 20:30 Hrs on 26th September 2008 - CLT
Title of the Talk: Biomaterials and how they will change our lives
Advances in drug delivery and tissue engineering are revolutionizing medical therapies. New drug delivery technologies including novel polymers and intelligent microchips promise to create new treatments for cancer, heart disease and many other illnesses. Furthermore, by combining mammalian cells with synthetic polymers, new approaches for engineering tissues are being developed that may someday help repair tissues for patients with burns, damaged cartilage, paralysis and vascular disease.
Guido van Rossum is the creator of Python, one of the major programming languages on and off the web. Born and brought up in the Netherlands, he received a masters degree from the University of Amsterdam in 1982. He later worked for various research institutes, including the Dutch National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science(CWI), Amsterdam, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, Maryland, and the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), Reston, Virginia. Guido started work on the Python programming language as a "hobby", something that would keep him occupied in his free time. In the eighteen years that have passed since then, Python has grown to be vastly popular and garnered Guido several awards, including the Award for the Advancement of Free Software given by the Free Software Foundation and the NLUUG Award 2003 for extraordinary services to the community of users of Unix and Open Systems. He is currently employed by Google, spends half his time on Python, and lives in Silicon Valley with his wife and son.