The Einstein Legacy Society recognizes those friends of the Institute who have made a planned gift or who have included a commitment to the Institute in their estate plans.The Society honors the memory Albert Einstein, one of the Institute’s first Faculty members, serving from 1933 until his death in 1955. The Einstein Legacy Society was created in 1996, and is co-chaired by Trustee Emeritus Martin A. Chooljian and Charles and Rosanna Jaffin.

June 14 - 18, 2010

Organizers:  Jean Bourgain, Russell Impagliazzo, Peter Sarnak and Avi Wigderson

Workshop Homepage:http://www.math.ias.edu/pseudo2010

Program: http://www.math.ias.edu/pseudo2010/program.

The nature and extent of experimentation in ancient Greek and Roman science remains controversial. In this lecture, Heinrich von Staden, Professor in the School of Historical Studies, analyzes experiments conducted by biologists and physicians on living animals from the fourth century BC to the second century AD. He looks closely at the motivations of the ancient scientists, their methods, their results, and the range of animal species—indigenous and exotic—on which they performed experiments, as well as the limits, ethical or other, on animal experimentation in antiquity. Significant changes over time, in particular the bold move from conducting such experiments only before a small circle of students to performing them in public spaces, often before a sizable audience, are also examined.

Charles Simonyi, Chairman of the Institute’s Board of Trustees and President and CEO of Intentional Software Corporation, is the first and only “space tourist” to fly twice: first in 2007 and most recently in 2009, for a combined total of twenty-eight days in space. In this talk, Dr. Simonyi discusses daily life in a spacecraft and on the International Space Station, and shows footage of the dynamic return trip from orbit to the ground in Kazakhstan.

We consider the problem of approximately solving a system of homogeneous linear equations over reals, where each equation contains at most three variables. Since the all-zero assignment always satisfies all the equations exactly, we restrict the assignments to be "non-trivial".

Paul Atewell, Leon Levy Foundation Member, School of Social Science. In the United States, ever-increasing proportions of high school graduates continue into college, and more and more undergraduates continue into master’s programs. One concern with educational expansion is that many students do not complete their degrees; they “drop out.” Some read this as proof that too many students are going to college, but other scholars argue that not enough Americans are receiving degrees. In this talk, Paul Attewell, Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, will consider the reasons behind the dropout phenomenon, examining individual factors but also highlighting government policies and institutional practices that undercut students’ progress toward graduation.

*It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their own interest. Each participant in a competitive economy is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.*
Adam Smith, 1776

Intensive study throughout the last three decades has yielded a rigorous understanding of the spectral-gap of the Glauber dynamics for the Ising model on Z² everywhere except at criticality. While the critical behavior of the Ising model has long been the focus for physicists, mathematicians have only recently developed an understanding of its critical geometry with the advent of SLE, CLE and new tools to study conformally invariant systems. A rich interplay exists between the static and dynamic models.

The cover time of a graph is one of the most basic and well-studied properties of the simple random walk, and yet a number of fundamental questions concerning cover times have remained open. We show that there is a deep connection between cover times of graphs and Talagrand's majorizing measure theory. In particular, we prove that the cover time can be characterized, up to universal constants, by the majorizing measure value of a certain metric space on the underlying graph.