After Hours Conversations 2017-2018
October - November 2017 ; February - March 2018
After Hours Conversations is a program of informal meetings that are held at Harry's Bar in the upper level of Simons Hall, from 5:00 pm till 7:00 pm, on Mondays and Thursdays, in October and November and again in February and March.
These talks are open to faculty, members, visitors, staff, spouses, and partners in an effort to encourage cross-discipline communication at IAS. Professors Piet Hut, Yve-Alain Bois, Didier Fassin, and Patrick Geary will moderate the sessions. Professor Vladimir Voevodsky, who was a co-organizer of this series, sadly passed away at the start of the first term.
The format is as follows. At 5:30 pm, someone will give an informal presentation of no more than 10 minutes, intended for a general audience. The topic will be a brief description of a major open problem in his or her field, together with suggestions for possible future progress with respect to that problem. This talk will be followed by 20 minutes of discussion, until 6:00 pm. During the remaining hour, everyone is free to mingle in more general discussions, preferably with others not from their own School.
If anyone would like to volunteer for giving a talk, please send an email to Piet Hut (piet@ias.edu), Yve-Alain Bois (yab@ias.edu), Didier Fassin (dfassin@ias.edu), or Patrick Geary (geary@ias.edu).
To receive announcements of upcoming talks by email, contact Dawn Dunbar (ddunbar@ias.edu).
Note that in Harry's Bar all beverages including bottled water must be purchased with an IAS card. If you would like to purchase a drink, it would be best to arrive around 5:15, to allow the line at the bar to be processed before the start of the talk. Thank you for your cooperation.
Here is the list of speakers for the 10-minute presentations:
First Semester
Monday, October 2, 2017
Presentation by: Ohad Nachtomy, Program in Interdisciplinary Studies
Title: Infinity and Life in Leibniz Philosophy
Host: Piet Hut
Thursday, October 5, 2017
Presentation by: Didier Fassin, School of Social Science
Title: Do We Know Why We Punish?
Host: Piet Hut
Monday, October 9, 2017
Presentation by: Avi Wigderson, School of Mathematics
Title: AI - Why Will It Succeed This Time (and What Will It Mean)
Host: Piet Hut
Thursday, October 12, 2017
Presentation by: Alexander Nagel, School of Historical Studies
Title: Elsewhereness in Renaissance Art
Host: Yve-Alain Bois
Monday, October 16, 2017
Presentation by: Mary Geary, Nurse, Writer and Former Healthcare Executive
Title: Book talk for "Possibilities: Insights and Wisdom from Women Who Have Combined Marriage, Motherhood and High Professional Achievement"
Host: Patrick Geary
Thursday, October 19, 2017
Presentation by: Hartwin Brandt, School of Historical Studies
Title: Is the Ancient Hippocratic Oath Concerned with Physician-Assisted Suicide?
Host: Patrick Geary
Monday, October 23, 2017
Presentation by: Kathleen Coleman, School of Historical Studies
Title: Douglas Livingstone, Marine Biologist and South African Poet Laureate
Host: Patrick Geary
Thursday, October 26, 2017
Presentation by: Paulina Ochoa Espejo, School of Social Science
Title: What is Wrong With Border Walls?
Host: Didier Fassin
Monday, October 30, 2017
Presentation by: Pia de Jong, Author
Title: The Wound and the Bow: From Crisis to Creativity
Host: Piet Hut
Thursday, November 2, 2017
Presentation by: Angelos Chaniotis, School of Historical Studies
Title: Is the IAS a Unique Research Environment and Is This a Good Thing? A Historian's Perspective
Host: Patrick Geary
Monday, November 6, 2017
Presentation by: Lawrence Rosen, School of Social Science
Title: The Mathematics Behind Islamic Mosaics
Host: Didier Fassin
Thursday, November 9, 2017
Presentation by: Douglas Lin, School of Natural Sciences
Title: What If We Found Suggestive Signs of Life on Other Planets?
Host: Piet Hut
Monday, November 13, 2017
Presentation by: Kevin W. Martin, School of Historical Studies
Title: Syria: How Did We Get Here?
Host: Patrick Geary
Thursday, November 16, 2017
Presentation by: Juan Maldacena, School of Natural Sciences
Title: Quantum Teleportation
Host: Piet Hut
Monday, November 20, 2017
Presentation by: Adam Izdebski, School of Historical Studies
Title: Coping with Climate Change in the Past. Any Lessons for the Future?
Host: Patrick Geary
Thursday, November 23, 2017
[ No meeting this day; IAS is closed for the Thanksgiving holiday ]
Monday, November 27, 2017
Presentation by: Johanna Bockman, School of Social Science
Title: Is Globalization Even Possible?
Host: Didier Fassin
Thursday, November 30, 2017
Presentation by: Valerie Garver, School of Historical Studies
Title: Do Clothes Proclaim, Make, or Govern the Man?
Host: Patrick Geary
Second Semester
Thursday, February 1, 2018
Presentation by: Marta Hanson, School of Historical Studies
Title: Chinese Divination and Embodied Cognition
Host: Patrick Geary
Monday, February 5, 2018
Presentation by: Peter Coviello, School of Social Science
Title: Does Sex Make You a God?
Host: Didier Fassin
Thursday, February 8, 2018
Presentation by: Matias Zaldarriaga, School of Natural Sciences
Title: Going for the Gold: Gravitational waves from colliding neutron stars and light from heavy elements
Host: Piet Hut
Monday, February 12, 2018
Presentation by: Johan Heilbron, School of Social Science
Title: Are There (Still) National Traditions in the Sciences?
Host: Didier Fassin
Thursday, February 15, 2018
Presentation by: Rory Yeomans, School of Historical Studies
Title: Can a United Europe Ever Work?
Host: Piet Hut
Monday, February 19, 2018
[ no meeting this day; IAS is closed for President's Day]
Thursday, February 22, 2018
Presentation by: Nicola Di Cosmo, School of Historical Studies
Title: Venice, Genoa, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma
Host: Patrick Geary
Monday, February 26, 2018
Presentation by: Jonathan Israel, School of Historical Studies
Title: The American and French Revolutions: Basically different or essentially parallel?
Host: Patrick Geary
Thursday, March 1, 2018
Presentation by: Angelos Chaniotis, School of Historical Studies
Title: Much Ado About Nothing! the Controversy over the Name Macedonia
Host: Piet Hut
Monday, March 5, 2018
Presentation by: Ian Jauslin, School of Mathematics
Title: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Atoms: The thermodynamic limit and the significance of infinity
Host: Piet Hut
Thursday, March 8, 2018
Presentation by: Jonathan Sachs, School of Historical Studies
Title: Slow Time
Host: Patrick Geary
Monday, March 12, 2018
Presentation by: Sara Farris, School of Social Science
Title: Does Migration Lower Workers' Wages?
Host: Didier Fassin
Thursday, March 15, 2018
Presentation by: George Steinmetz, School of Social Science
Title: What Is the Difference Between the Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, and Humanities
Host: Didier Fassin
Monday, March 19, 2018
Presentation by: Vera Gluscevic, School of Natural Sciences
Title: Did We Discover Evidence for Dark Matter Collisions at the Dawn of First Stars?
Host: Piet Hut
Thursday, March 22, 2018
Presentation by: Mehdi Shadmehr, School of Social Science
Title: Total Positivity and the Nature of Coercion in Right-wing Dictatorships
Host: Piet Hut
Monday, March 26, 2018
Presentation by: Álvaro Morcillo-Laiz, School of Social Science
Title: Do Science Patrons Decide What We Know?
Host: Piet Hut
Thursday, March 29, 2018
Presentation by: Helen Wong, School of Mathematics
Title: Mathematics or (K)not?
Host: Patrick Geary