Lectures

General Public Lectures

MoMath – “Fractal Beauty” – July 2015

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.

Yale – “The Riemann Hypothesis and Music” – December 2012

Science cuts two ways, of course; its products can be used for both good and evil. But there’s no turning back from science. The early warnings about technological dangers also come from science.

Research Lectures

IMPA Brazil – “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Thin Orbits”

Never in all their history have men been able truly to conceive of the world as one: a single sphere, a globe, having the qualities of a globe, a round earth in which all the directions eventually meet, in which there is no center because every point, or none, is center — an equal earth which all men occupy as equals. The airman’s earth, if free men make it, will be truly round: a globe in practice, not in theory.