[Colloquium] 4/11 TTIC Distinguished Lecture Series: Christos Papadimitriou, Columbia University

[Alicia McClarin]

*When:    *  Thursday, April 11th at *11:00 am*



*Where:     *TTIC, 6045 S. Kenwood Avenue, 5th Floor, Room 526



*Who:        *Christos Papadimitriou, Columbia University

*Title:        *Computation in the Brain

*Abstract:* How does the brain beget the mind?  How do molecules, cells and
synapses effect reasoning, intelligence, language, science?   Despite
dazzling progress in experimental neuroscience we do not seem to be making
progress in the overarching question -- the gap is huge and a completely
new approach seems to be required.  As Richard Axel recently put it:  "We
don't have a logic for the transformation of neural activity into thought."
  What kind of formal system would qualify as this "logic"?  I will sketch
a possible answer. (Joint work with Santosh Vempala, Wolfgang Maass, Larry
Abbott, Dan Mitropolsky, and Mike Collins.)


*Bio:* Christos H. Papadimitriou is the Donovan Family Professor of
Computer Science at Columbia University. Before joining Columbia in 2017,
he was a professor at UC Berkeley for the previous 22 years, and before
that he taught at Harvard, MIT, NTU Athens, Stanford, and UCSD.  He has written
five textbooks and many articles on algorithms and complexity, and their
applications to optimization, databases, control, AI, robotics, economics
and game theory, the Internet, evolution and the brain.  He holds a PhD
from Princeton (1976) and an honorary doctorate from Univ. de Paris
Dauphine (2017), and seven other honorary doctorates.  He is a member of
the National Academy of Sciences of the US, the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering, and he has received
the Knuth prize, the Godel prize, and the von Neumann medal. He has also
written three novels: “Turing ,” “Logicomix”  and his latest “Independence”.

*Host: *Avrim Blum <avrim at ttic.edu>

-- 
*Alicia McClarin*
*Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago*
*6045 S. Kenwood Ave., **Office 510*
*Chicago, IL 60637*
*773-702-5370*
*www.ttic.edu* <http://www.ttic.edu/>
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