Christopher Essex, a professor in the department of applied mathematics at the University of Western Ontario, will speak at Cornell College on March 21. He will talk about "When Scientific Technicalities Matter."
Christopher Essex
Sometimes mathematicians and physicists seem obsessive. Their geekish technicalities don’t seem to matter, even though they actually do. This lecture is about how some of these seeming minutiae actually are important to how we comprehend our world, and whether we are able to fear it or marvel at it.
This position is articulated under the following headings:
Discovering new science: Harder than learning what humanity already knows
Sierpinski and the Sistine Chapel
Scale invariance and Raisin Bran
What Grover didn’t tell you about “near” and “far”
Implementing what’s new always takes time and gives surprises
Classical physics is still good
Hate science. Hate yourself.
Exposed to dangerous eclipse radiation
Calculus as a matter of life and death
Humans and the memories of the generations
Essex's lecture is part of the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar program. Cornell's chapter of Phi Beta Kappa was founded in 1923, and is one of fewer than 300 members of the country's most prestigious academic honor society.
