Letter from Enrique Pujals:

Having been inspired by the interdisciplinary spirit and collaboration across disciplines, I would like to call attention to an initiative of the Math Department at the GC, coordinated by Enrique Pujals, that will take place throughout the current Spring semester.

Entitled, “Dynamical Systems: Ideas in Applications”, the idea is to bring together top minds whose work both spans and brings together the fields of neuroscience, mathematics, physics, biology and economics. 

The initiative consists of a series of public lectures that will welcome the participation of the following academics:

• Dr. Bard Ermentrout, a mathematician from the University of Pittsburgh with significant research in neuroscience, will speak about patterns in vision;
• Dr. Amie Wilkinson, a dynamicist from the University of Chicago will speak about using mathematics to develop better particle accelerators;
• Dr. Steve Smale, a Fields Medalist from the University of California Berkeley that has impacted topology, dynamical systems, economics, computer science and biology will speak about morphogenesis and cell cycles.
• Dr. Ana Fostel, an economist from University of Virginia and Dr. Jean Geanakoplos, an economist from Yale University will speak about their work on a very present topic, Financial Innovation and Crisis.

These interdisciplinary lectures are intended to incubate a culture of collaboration among researchers in distinct but increasingly interconnected fields with the goal of enhancing the potential for groundbreaking research at The Graduate Center.

Please find the poster for the lectures attached. Each day of the series will have both morning and afternoon sessions of two hours each with the same academics. The morning sessions are intended to provide background information about the subjects and are geared towards the general public while the afternoon sessions provide more depth and are more technical in nature.

Please feel free to join any of the sessions that may be of interest to you. I am happy to discuss this initiative further at your convenience.