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On view in the Hayden Library Loft (Floor 1M) May 12 - September 30, 2025Throughout her life, Katharine Dexter McCormick widened the horizons of what was possible for women. A suffragist, philanthropist, and scientist, she broke boundaries from an early age, becoming one of the first women to graduate from MIT. She later went on to fund McCormick Hall, the first on-campus dormitory for women at MIT. Learn more about the exhibit

Writing Together Online offers the structured writing time to help you stay focused and productive during the busy fall months. Join our daily 90-minute writing sessions and become part of a community of scholars who connect online, set realistic goals, and write together in the spirit of accountability and camaraderie. We offer writing sessions every workday, Monday through Friday. The program is open to all MIT students, postdocs, faculty, staff, and affiliates who are working on papers, proposals, thesis/dissertation chapters, application materials, and other writing projects.Please register for any number of sessions:Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 9:00–10:30am (EST) Tuesday and Thursday, 8:00–9:30am and 9:30-11:00am (EST)For more information and to register, go to this link or check the WCC website. Please spread the word and join with colleagues and friends. MIT Students and postdocs who attend at least 5 sessions per challenge will be entered into a gift-card raffle.

Writing Together Online offers the structured writing time to help you stay focused and productive during the busy fall months. Join our daily 90-minute writing sessions and become part of a community of scholars who connect online, set realistic goals, and write together in the spirit of accountability and camaraderie. We offer writing sessions every workday, Monday through Friday. The program is open to all MIT students, postdocs, faculty, staff, and affiliates who are working on papers, proposals, thesis/dissertation chapters, application materials, and other writing projects.Please register for any number of sessions:Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 9:00–10:30am (EST) Tuesday and Thursday, 8:00–9:30am and 9:30-11:00am (EST)For more information and to register, go to this link or check the WCC website. Please spread the word and join with colleagues and friends. MIT Students and postdocs who attend at least 5 sessions per challenge will be entered into a gift-card raffle.

Janet Echelman's Remembering the Future widens our perspective in time, giving sculptural form to the history of the Earth's climate from the last ice age to the present moment, and then branching out to visualize multiple potential futures.Constructed from colored twines and ropes that are braided, knotted and hand-spliced to create a three-dimensional form, the immersive artwork greets you with its grand scale presiding over the MIT Museum lobby.This large-scale installation by 2022-2024 MIT Distinguished Visiting Artist Janet Echelman, was developed during her residency at the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST). Architect, engineer and MIT Associate Professor Caitlin Mueller collaborated on the development of the piece.The title, Remembering the Future was inspired by the writings commonly attributed to Søren Kierkegaard: "The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you'll never have."As the culmination of three years of dedicated research and collaboration, this site-specific installation explores Earth's climate timeline, translating historical records and possible futures into sculptural form.Echelman's climate research for this project was guided by Professor Raffaele Ferrari and the MIT Lorenz Center, creators of En-ROADS simulator which uses current climate data and modeling to visualize the impact of environmental policies and actions on energy systems.Learn more about Janet Echelman and the MIT Museum x CAST Collaboration.Learn more about the exhibition at the MIT Museum.

Are you Intune?The IS&T Endpoints Team is sharing updates on the Microsoft Intune cloud-based endpoint management solution. Whether you're #teamIntune, #teamMECM, or a little of both, join us to learn more about what's new with Intune, how it harmonizes with MECM, and how together, they may strike the right chord for your DLCI's endpoint management goals. (And we promise, no autotune will be used in the making of this presentation.)FoodIf you're joining us at Sloan, we'll be serving pizza and salad AND ROLLS from Bertucci's!RegisterWhether you're joining in person or via Zoom, please register so that we can get a more accurate count for refreshments and expected attendance.Contact usIf you require any accessibility accommodations, please email itpartners-plan@mit.edu to make your accommodation request. Some accommodations require 2-3 weeks to arrange; every effort will be made to accommodate advance requests.If you have any questions, contact the IT Partners Planning Team at itpartners-plan@mit.edu or #ask-it-partners-planning-team on Slack.

Location: 46-3310Speaker: Zitong LuAffiliation: Kanwisher LabTitle: Behavioral and Neural Representations of Human Visual Perception: Integration across Saccades, 3D Space, and Real-World Object PropertiesAbstract: Understanding how the human brain processes visual information in real-world contexts is a central goal of vision science. While traditional studies have provided valuable insights under controlled conditions, they often fail to capture the dynamic and semantically rich nature of everyday experience. This talk investigates human visual representations of object feature and spatial information in ecologically relevant contexts through three studies: world-centered (spatiotopic) object-location binding in dynamic saccade context, spatiotemporal representations of 3D visual perception, and disentangled object real-world size representation from retinal size and depth. Together, these findings provide a deeper understanding of visual perception in ecological contexts, with implications for cognitive neuroscience and applied fields.

MIT Sloan Admissions is hosting an information session just for MIT undergraduates! Join us to learn more about our specialized masters program options available for college seniors. You will have the opportunity to ask questions during this interactive session and learn more about our STEM-designated programs below.Master of Finance This 18-month STEM-designated program prepares you for premier career opportunities in finance through our global reputation, world-renowned faculty, and a rigorous, hands-on approach to adaptive problem-solving.Master of Business Analytics A 12-month STEM-designated program focused on applying the tools of modern data science, optimization, and machine learning to solve real-world challenges and integrate data insights across every sector of business.This CAPD and Sloan event is open to MIT undergraduates. Registration is required. Please register here.

Speaker: Barath Venkateswaran (Princeton)Title: Bend it like Kirchhoff: Fabricating slender structures using fluid physicsAbstract:Slender structures are prevalent around us: the hair on your head, the syrup you pour on your pancakes are only a few examples. Slender structures, both solid and liquid, are well-described using Kirchhoff rod theory. In this talk, I will discuss how we can use inherent fluid phenomena to fabricate slender structures and how we can model deformations in slender systems using Kirchhoff rod theory.In the first half of my talk, I will demonstrate how we can transform an initially formless elastomeric film into an array of elastic drops and then into an array of slender structures. In a lab setting, we stack multiple instances of Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities of curable elastomeric films coated onto the underside of a flat plate. The interplay of solidification and hydrodynamics produces corrugated, slender structures, which we refer to as flexicles due to their resemblance to icicles. We will discuss the subtle combination of chaos and order that confers our flexicles, their structure, shape, arrangement, and, ultimately, deformability.In the second half of my talk, I will demonstrate how submerged miscible fluid jets can be utilized to produce microfibers with sub-100-micron thicknesses. The fabrication method utilizes two jets submerged in a bath: a fast, assistive water jet and an adjacent slow prefiber jet of a photopolymerizable solution. The prefiber jet is bent, entrained, and thinned through the influence of the adjacent water jet, and then polymerized using UV light. The ensuing dynamics enable the production of fibers that are significantly thinner than the jet nozzles used. I will talk about ongoing work in modeling thin, submerged, viscous jets within a flow field.

"Governance of Supply Relationships: Evidence from Indian Manufacturing" | Aroon Narayanan (MIT)

Ten minutes for your mind@2:50 every day at 2:50 pm in multiple time zones:Europa@2:50, EET, Athens, Helsinki (UTC+2) (7:50 am EST) https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88298032734Atlantica@2:50, EST, New York, Toronto (UTC-4) https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85349851047Pacifica@2:50, PST, Los Angeles, Vancouver (UTC=7) (5:50 pm EST) https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85743543699Almost everything works better again if you unplug it for a bit, including your mind. Stop by and unplug. Get the benefits of mindfulness without the fuss.@2:50 meets at the same time every single day for ten minutes of quiet together.No pre-requisite, no registration needed.Visit the website to view all @2:50 time zones each day.at250.org or at250.mit.edu

Speaker: Yongnam Lee (IBS-Center for Complex Geometry)Title: Compact moduli of elliptic surfaces with a multiple fiberAbstract:Motivated by Miranda and Ascher-Bejleri's works on compactifications of the moduli space of rational elliptic surfaces with a section, we study constructions and boundaries of compact moduli spaces of elliptic surfaces with a multiple fiber.In a joint work with Donggun Lee, we propose an approach to understanding the limit surfaces when a multiple fiber degenerates into an additive type singular fiber, via Q-Gorenstein smoothings of slc surfaces. And in ongoing work with Dori Bejleri and Donggun Lee, we study compact moduli spaces of the rational elliptic surfaces of index 2 and of Enriques surfaces with bisections using the theory of twisted stable maps.

Speaker: Michal Wojciechowski (Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences)Title: Singular measure with tiny Fourier spectrum on three dimensional sphereAbstract: I will present a construction of a singular measure on three dimensional sphere 𝑆3 whose non-zero components in spherical harmonic decomposition are concentrated around lines 𝑦 = 𝑎𝑥 and 𝑥 = 𝑎𝑦. This could be seen as a generalization of Aleksandrov’s singular pluriharmonic measure or an inverse to the Brummelhuis condition of absolute continuity. The main ingredient is a construction of bounded spherical harmonics with small, localized Fourier spectra.

Speaker: Manu Prakash, StanfordHost: Lindsay CaseTitle: "Recreational biology: Topological puzzles across scales"The Biology Colloquium is a weekly seminar held throughout the academic year — featuring distinguished speakers in many areas of the biological sciences from universities and institutions worldwide. More information on speakers, their affiliations, and titles of their talks will be added as available. Unless otherwise stated, the Colloquium will be held live in Stata 32-123 (Kirsch auditorium) Contact Margaret Cabral with questions.

TBD

Title: Foundation Models of Human CognitionAbstract:Most models of human cognition are domain-specific, meaning that their scope is restricted to a single type of problem. The human mind, on the other hand, does not work this way -- it is a unified system whose processes are deeply intertwined. In this talk, I present my ongoing work on foundation models of human cognition: models that not only predict, simulate, and explain behavior in a single domain but instead offer a unified take on our mind.

Isabel Di Tella (MIT)

Join the WriteWise workshop series to master essential research and writing skills. From getting started and honing your reading techniques to using sources effectively, explaining why your work matters and crafting impactful titles, each workshop equips you with the tools needed to excel in academia and beyond.Session 1: StartWise: Starting Your Research-Based Writing Project (Thurs., Sept. 11th) Session 2: ReadWise: Effective Reading and Note-Taking (Tues., Sept. 16th) Session 3: CiteWise: Citing Sources & Avoiding Plagiarism (Thurs., Sept. 18th) Session 4: SignificanceWise: Identifying the "So What" of Your Work (Tues., Sept. 23rd) Session 5: ProcessWise: Developing Your Project and Maintaining Writing Momentum (Thurs., Sept., 25th) Session 6: AbstractWise: Writing a Strong Abstract (Tues., Sept. 30th) Session 7: PolishWise: Fine-Tuning for Clarity and Style (Thurs., Oct. 2nd) Session 8: TitleWise: Crafting Effective Titles (Tues., Oct., 7th)For more information, visit the WCC website: https://cmsw.mit.edu/wcc-workshops/.

Speaker: Sho Tanimoto (Nagoya University)Title: Homological sieve and Manin's conjectureAbstract: I present our proofs for a version of Manin's conjecture over $\mathbb F_q$ for $q$ large and Cohen—Jones—Segal conjecture over $\mathbb C$ for rational curves on split quartic del Pezzo surfaces. The proofs share a common method which builds upon prior work of Das—Tosteson. We call this method as homological sieve method. The main ingredients of this method are (i) the construction of bar complexes formalizing the inclusion-exclusion principle and its point counting estimates, (ii) dimension estimates for spaces of rational curves using conic bundle structures, (iii) estimates of error terms using arguments of Sawin—Shusterman based on Katz's results, and (iv) a certain virtual height zeta function revealing the compatibility of bar complexes and Peyre's constant. Our argument verifies the heuristic approach to Manin's conjecture over global function fields given by Batyrev and Ellenberg-Venkatesh, and it is a nice combination of various tools from algebraic geometry (birational geometry of moduli spaces of rational curves), arithmetic geometry (simplicial schemes, their homotopy theory, and Grothendieck—Lefschetz trace formula), algebraic topology (the inclusion-exclusion principle and Vassiliev type method of the bar complexes) and some elementary analytic number theory. This is joint work with Ronno Das, Brian Lehmann, and Phil Tosteson with a help by Will Sawin and Mark Shusterman.

Get outside and play! Bananagrams, Connect Four, Hopscotch, Scrabble, Corn Hole, and more.Choose from a fun and varied selection of board games and lawn games, all free to borrow during your visit. Plenty of options available for adults, kids, small groups and pairs.Picnics, dogs, and groups are welcome! Just make sure to follow our guidelines.Free and open to all! Please note that this event is weather dependent.Special Play+ events in this series:7/22 - Free ice cream sandwiches while supplies last! 🍦7/29 - Rescheduled8/5 - The theme this week is Board Games!8/19 and 9/2 - Free lemonade while supplies last! 🍋

For Researchers Interested in Commercializing their New TechnologyExplore taking your new technology to the marketplace Get entrepreneurial training, support to identify customers Learn how to apply for $50,000 from the NSFIncrease your chances of receiving an SBIR/STTR awardClick here for more details

Join us for an evening of film and conversation featuring Cosmic Coda, a documentary by MJ Doherty.How do you build a machine to test an idea—Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity—that’s beyond most people’s comprehension? And what does an astrophysicist actually do on a regular Tuesday while probing the depths of space?In Cosmic Coda, a naive grad student filmmaker asks these questions in 1985—then returns nearly 40 years later to continue the journey, capturing one of the most profound scientific discoveries of our time as it happens.Through selected clips from the film and a live discussion with physicists Lisa Barsotti, David Kaiser, and Lyman Page, this special program traces the story of LIGO and the landmark detection of gravitational waves. Together, we’ll explore how our understanding of the universe—and the very nature of scientific discovery—has evolved across generations.September 30 6 - 7:30pm $15 General Admission, $5 for MIT ID Holders

ORSEL and the realtalk@MIT team invite the MIT community to reflect on difficult times and ultimately find an answer to: What is your light?Take a pause from your busy life and connect with strangers in a facilitated, meditative experience.The MIT Chapel is a non-denominational space located next to Kresge Auditorium and the Kresge Oval. We welcome MIT folks from all religious and spiritual backgrounds, including those outside of typical traditions.Attendees may be photographed; at the end of this conversation, there will be an opportunity to contribute your voice to the October 20 event, What is Your Light?, a multi-sensory installation featuring live music, interactive video projection, and an original audio track built from community responses to the title question. What is Your Light is funded in part by the Council for the Arts at MIT.

Spain@MIT will host its traditional welcome event to kick off the 25-26 academic year with fun and good food.We will introduce the club mission, hold board elections, and give a warm welcome to MIT to new and returning students alike.This event is funded by the SGFC and open to everyone in the MIT community.

Join Berlin-based curator and playwright Sasha Salzmann, director and Theater faculty Jay Scheib, and Lecturer of German Emily Goodling for an open conversation on the place of theater in our contemporary world. From Germany’s state-supported stages to the evolving aesthetics of U.S. performance, the discussion will explore theater and performance as tools for social critique, community building, and political engagement. What are the limits and the potentialities of theater in our society, and what can we learn about them from two very different cultural contexts?Open to all; reception afterwards.This conversation is made possible thanks to generous support from CAST, Global Languages, and Theater.Date and time: Tuesday Sept. 30th, 2025 - 7:15-8:30 with a reception to followLocation: W97, Room 160

Join Berlin-based curator and playwright Sasha Salzmann, Music and Theater Arts Section director and Theater faculty Jay Scheib, and Lecturer of German Emily Goodling for an open conversation on the place of theater in our contemporary world. From Germany’s state-supported stages to the evolving aesthetics of U.S. performance, the discussion will explore theater and performance as tools for social critique, community building, and political engagement. Reception to follow.