Simons Foundation Lectures

Elisabeth Krause - The landscape of current and coming cosmological surveys (Sept. 9, 2025)

2025 Simons Collaboration on Learning the Universe Annual Meeting (September 18-19, 2025)https://www.simonsfoundation.org/event/simons-collaboration-on-learning-the-unive

Steven Girvin - The Race to Build Quantum Computers (February 12, 2020)

The first quantum revolution brought us the great technological advances of the 20th century—the transistor, the laser, the atomic clock and GPS. A ‘second quantum revolu

Alex Pouget - Brain wide representation of prior information (May 6, 2025)

The neural representations of prior information about the state of the world are poorly understood. Here, to investigate them, we examined brain-wide recordings collected

Alain Aspect - From Einstein’s Doubts to Quantum Technologies (February 19, 2020)

The debate between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr over the interpretation of quantum mechanics was settled by the experimental tests of Bell’s inequalities. Those experim

ICM 2026 Invited Section Lecture - Michael Wemyss

The Classification of 3-Fold FlopsThis talk will overview recent progress in understanding and classifying one of the most elementary of birational surgeries within algeb

Nicole Rust - The representation of mood in the primate insula (May 6, 2025)

How does the brain shape mood? Answering this question is difficult. In this talk, I report that a strong neural correlate of happiness is reflected in the persistent res

Shirley Ho - The First AI Simulation of the Universe is Fast and Accurate (February 26, 2020)

A full understanding of the evolution of the universe’s structure is one of the holy grails of modern astrophysics. Astrophysicists survey large volumes of the universe a

Andrew Leifer - Global brain dynamics in C. elegans: A decade of progress (May 6, 2025)

The Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain (SCGB) aims to expand our understanding of the role of internal brain processes in the arc from sensation to action, thereby

Corina Tarnita - Self-Organization and Robustness in Biological Systems (March 4, 2020)

Understanding and managing complex systems — characterized by emergent, self-organized patterns at scales larger than those of the interacting parts — has crystallized as

SCGB-Origins - Bill Newsome (May 5, 2025)

Bill Newsome recounts the origins of the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain (SCGB), including early conversations with Jim Simons, the pivotal Buttermilk Falls work

Gwen Eadie - Astrostatistics in the Era of Large Surveys (January 31, 2020)

Astrostatistics is an interdisciplinary field that lives on the boundary between astronomy and statistics. This interdisciplinary field seeks to answer fundamental scienc

Kevin Buzzard - Where is Mathematics Going? (September 24, 2025)

Where is Mathematics Going?~Is there a better way to do this? In this Presidential Lecture, Kevin Buzzard will discuss the future of mathematics and the role computers ca

CLASS + SONG Workshop - Coding 2 (July 16, 2019)

More details: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/event/class-song-workshop/Uploaded 30-08-19

Saurabh Jha - White Dwarf Supernovae: Astrophysics and Cosmology (February 7, 2020)

Observations of type Ia supernovae (SN Ia) ushered in a cosmological revolution: the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, driven by dark energy. I will describe cur

Victor Wang: Multiplicative Structure in Additive Problems (September 12, 2025)

Victor Wang will discuss some Diophantine counting problems for which an analysis via the circle method features the multiplicative statistics of an associated polynomial

Matteo Viel - Hydrogen as a Cosmological Probe (February 21, 2020)

I will review the use of neutral hydrogen (HI) in the post reionization era as a tracer of the structure formation process. I will focus on atomic hydrogen both in absorp

Peter Sarnak: Distribution of Zeros, Eigenvalues and Eigenfunctions...(September 12, 2025)

Distribution of Zeros, Eigenvalues and Eigenfunctions in Number Theory~We review some of the statistical laws that appear to govern zeta functions and automorphic forms,

Lina Necib - Dark Matter in the Era of Gaia (February 13, 2020)

The Gaia mission has provided distance and velocity measurements of over a billion stars in the Milky Way, making it the largest stellar catalog at hand. Simultaneously,

Melanie Matchett Wood: Universal Distributions of Groups and Algebraic Objects (September 12, 2025)

The conjectural distributions for class groups of number fields from the Cohen–Lenstra–Martinet heuristics are known to be universal distributions on abelian groups. We w

Katelin Schutz - Searching for the invisible: how dark forces shape our Universe (March 5, 2020)

How different would our Universe look with the addition of extra particles and forces beyond what we know? We already have ample gravitational evidence for at least one i