We are pleased to announce the "Zakharov Lectureship" in honor of Regents Professor Vladimir Zakharov's retirement, his contributions to the Program in Applied Mathematics and the Mathematics Department. The event will support an annual series of lectures during the spring in Tucson. The first Zakharov Lectureship begins on Monday, January 31, 2022 and will be given by distinguished scientist, Professor Gregory Falkovich from the Weizmann Institute of Science. He will give a series of 5 lectures, once per week over 5 weeks on “Physical Nature of Information: How to receive, send and forget information”. Please see schedule and Notes .pdf below:
All lectures will be held at 4:00pm in the ENR2 building, Room S395 and on Zoom. Recordings of each lecture are posted below. We will use piazza for discussions of the lecture materials. If you are interested to contribute please sign up piazza.com/arizona/spring2022/am101
This event is sponsored by the Department of Mathematics, the Program in Applied Mathematics GIDP, the Data Science Institute, the Department of Hydrology & Atmospheric Sciences, and the College of Science.
| date | lecture topic |
|---|---|
| January 31, 2022 | Lecture 1: How the engineering question of thermal engine efficiency spawned two hundred years of ever-accelerating progress in fundamental science, communications and computations. Thermodynamic and statistical entropy. The puzzle of the second law of thermodynamics. How irreversible entropy growth appears from reversible flows in phase space via dynamical chaos. Entropy decrease and non-equilibrium fractal measures. Video |
| February 7, 2022 | Lecture 2: Asymptotic equipartition as a universal mathematical tool of statistical physics and information theory. Information as a choice. Entropy as the rate of information transfer. Two greatest code inventions: alphabet and positional numeral system. Entropy of the language and the genetic code. Video |
| February 14, 2022 |
Lecture 3: Communication theory. Mutual Information as a universal measure of correlation. Channel capacity and noisy channel theorem. Hypothesis testing and relative entropy. How to measure consciousness? Second law of thermodynamics made trivial. Distribution from information. |
| February 21, 2022 |
Lecture 4: Exorcising Maxwell demon, Landauer limitl. Learning by forgetting – renormalization group. “What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a spark of life. It is information.” Flies and spies. |
| February 28, 2022 |
Lecture 5: Rate distortion theory and information bottleneck. Information is money and life: proportional gambling and phenotype switching. Stochastic Web surfing and Google’s PageRank. Fluctuation theorems and modern forms of the second law of thermodynamics. Take-home lessons. |