9 July, 4.30 pm
ICTP, Budinich Lecture Hall
SISSA and ICTP will combine their strengths as international centres of physics and mathematics excellence to form a new institute dedicated to the two fields. The Institute for Geometry and Physics - IGAP will promote innovative and interdisciplinary research, highlighting the complementary and profound role that physics and mathematics contribute to each other. It will be based in Miramare, Trieste, in SISSA’s previous headquarters next to ICTP. The new structure strengthens the on-going collaboration between the two Institutes on these topics, boosting their strong capacity in mathematics and physics. It aims to create long-lasting training projects, with the ambition to become a reference point at the national and international level in the field.
Embodying the interdisciplinary nature of IGAP will be the inaugural speaker, theoretical physicist and mathematician Cumrun Vafa, the Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard University. Vafa sees the new institute as an important step in advancing our understanding of natural forces and laws. "Einstein found that geometry can explain the gravitational force. In the past 50 years we have seen how true and how important that relation is: geometry implies physics and physics implies structures and geometry. Physics and geometry together have proved to be an amazingly powerful tool in answering puzzles in physics on the one hand and shedding light, at the same time, to deep questions of mathematics," he explains.
The inauguration ceremony for IGAP will be livestreamed at ictp.it/livestream.
