Professor Alessandro Sfondrini: Looking for exact solutions

Galileo Galilei famously wrote that the universe is an open book, and that the language in which it is written is mathematics. Since then, our understanding of Nature has grown to encompass more and more complex phenomena, requiring increasingly sophisticated mathematical frameworks. This makes it harder to extract predictions and compare them with experiments. Sometimes it is enough to do so in some approximation, but there are fundamental questions which require exact, non-perturbative answers.

Remarkably, there exists a surprising number of models that describe interesting physical phenomena and can be solved exactly, owing to their symmetries. Historically, these models have been beacons of mathematical certainty in our haphazard exploration of Nature, and guided the development of mathematical physics itself. Professor Sfondrini will share with you his fascination for exactly-solvable models, and explain how they can be used to address fundamental questions such as the quantum properties of gravity.

Please arrive from 15:00 for a 15:15 start. The lecture is then followed by a reception at 16:15.