James A. Little Theater
Community Event
  US Mountain Time
 

Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lectures:  The Many Faces of Complexity

Robert May, Baron May of Oxford; Professor, Zoology, Oxford University and Imperial College; former president of Britain's Royal Society, and former Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK government

Scholar, science activist and complex systems pioneer Robert May brings his unique perspective to key topics in the field.

October 2

Lecture I - Beauty and Truth in Mathematics and Science

May explores the extent to which beauty has guided, and still guides, humanity's quest to understand how the world works, with a brief look at the interactions among beliefs, values, beauty, truth, and our expectations for tomorrow's world.

October 3

Lecture II - What Is Stability in Today’s Complex Financial Systems?

The economic crisis prompts May to explore how we might design financial services that satisfy their purpose of efficient distribution of capital in a free-market system but without the fragility and (hidden) costliness of our current systems, with emphasis on what ecology can teach us about banking.

October 4

Lecture III - People and Tomorrow’s (Too Small) World

What having more people on Earth, with each of them having a longer life span and greater per-person impact on our environment, means for the world’s climate and ecosystems and the services they deliver (with emphasis on how little we know about these questions).

SFI Host: 
Ginger Richardson