The Stratton Lecture: The Epidemic of LonelinessDate: Tuesday March 4Time: 12:15pm - 1:45pmLocation: MIT Wong Auditorium (E51-115)Join us for the 2025 Stratton Lecture as we delve into the growing epidemic of loneliness in modern society. Despite unprecedented digital connectivity, many individuals feel isolated and disconnected, with profound impacts on mental and physical health. We’ll explore the societal factors contributing to this phenomenon, the consequences for well-being, and strategies to rebuild authentic connections and stronger communities.Keynote Speaker: Professor Rebecca Saxe Remarks by: Professor Pattie Maes Remarks by: Zan BarryDiscussion Moderated by: Amy Brand, Director and Publisher of MIT PressThis event is co-sponsored by the MIT Retirees Association and MIT Press.A boxed lunch will be provided at the end of the event. If you have dietary restrictions, please let us know here.Rebecca Saxe is the John W. Jarve (1978) Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and the Associate Dean of Science at MIT. She studies the development and neural basis of human cognition, focusing on social cognition. Saxe obtained her Ph.D. from MIT and was a Harvard Junior Fellow before joining the MIT faculty in 2006. She has received the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences, a Guggenheim fellowship, the MIT Committed to Caring Award for graduate mentorship and is a member of American Academy of Arts and Science.Pattie Maes is the Germeshausen Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab where does research at the intersection of Human Computer Interaction and Artificial Intelligence. She is also an affiliated faculty member at MIT's center for Neuro-Biological Engineering. Maes pioneered the concept of Software Agents in the 90s and remains focused on the question of how software systems and novel devices might augment people and assist them with issues such as memory, learning, decision making and wellbeing.Susanna (Zan) Barry, PsyD: Manager of Programs, Community Wellness at MIT Health. Zan focuses on the health of the MIT community through programs and classes in sleep health, stress resilience, mindfulness, motivation, and meaning. Her background is in psychology and behavioral sleep medicine.Moderated by:Amy Brand, director and publisher of the MIT Press, one of the largest university presses in the world, and an important figure in open access publishing. The MIT Press is well known for its publications in emerging fields of scholarship and its pioneering use of technology. Brand’s career spans a wide array of experiences in academia and scholarly communications. She received her doctorate in cognitive science from MIT and has held a number of positions in scholarly communications, publishing, and open information access at MIT, Digital Science, and Harvard before returning to the press in 2015 to serve as director. She was executive producer of the Emmy-nominated documentary Picture a Scientist, a 2020 selection of the Tribeca Film Festival that highlights gender inequality in science. Some of Dr. Brand’s awards include the Laya Wiesner Community Award, the American Association for the Advancement of Science Kavli Science Journalism Gold Award, and the Award for Meritorious Achievement issued by the Council of Science Editors.

MIT Free English Class is for international students, sholars, spouses. Twenty seven years ago we created a community to welcome the nations to MIT and assist with language and friendship. Join our Tuesday/Thursday conversation classes around tables inside W11-190.

"Supply Shocks and Emissions When Firms Can Adapt" | Silke Forbes (Tufts)

Speaker: Vincent Tournat (CNRS, Le Mans Université / Harvard)Title: Dynamics of multistable mechanical metamaterials: recent results on nonlinear waves, transition fronts and their interactionsAbstract:The class of flexible mechanical metamaterials, which encompasses architected materials composed of highly compliant parts connecting much stiffer and heavier parts, has recently been systematically explored thanks to emerging techniques for their realization and accurate lumped-parameter models describing their dynamics. Examples of such metamaterials include kirigami, origami, elastic lattices with various topologies composed of rotating mass units connected by thin, flexible hinges, or systems of coupled buckled beams… These metamaterials can undergo large deformations and are known to support a wide variety of nonlinear waves, such as vector solitons, breathers, cnoidal waves, among others. Interestingly, by designing these materials with multistable inclusions, such as elastically coupled bistable mechanical units, we can observe phenomena such as transition waves. The transition wave presents itself as a progressive front travelling through the material as the multistable units sequentially switch from one equilibrium state to another, eventually leading to a partial or full reconfiguration of the structure.In this talk, I will highlight the fundamentals and a selection of recent results on nonlinear waves in flexible mechanical metamaterials and in particular transition waves in multistable metamaterials. Through theoretical, numerical and experimental examples, I will discuss some salient properties of these nonlinear waves and their interactions. While in the case of zero damping we find the wave dynamics generally obey the nonlinear KleinGordon equations, the presence of a significant nonzero damping heavily influences the multistable response and permits transition fronts that result from nonlinear reactiondiffusion equations. This class of flexible metamaterials thus gives rise to the emergence of specific properties not necessarily found in other waves supported by discrete and/or nonlinear media, and which can be rationally harnessed, e.g., strong non-reciprocity, robustness of the wave profile, extreme amplitude-dependent behavior… These metamaterials and their dynamics can therefore be designed and implemented for applications involving the local or global reconfiguration of a medium, the manipulation of a mechanical memory, the control of waves in space and time, mechanical computing and more generally to be the vector for embedded material intelligence.

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: Vasudevan Srinivas (Tata and Univ. of Buffalo)Title: Some finiteness results for the etale fundamental group in positive characteristicsAbstract:This talk will discuss some results on etale fundamental groups of varieties over an algebraically closed field of characteristic p > 0, based on joint work with Hélène Esnault and other coauthors. One result, along with Mark Shusterman, is that the tame fundamental group is finitely presented for such a variety which is the complement of an SNC divisor in a smooth projective variety. A second, along with Jakob Stix, is to give an obstruction for a smooth projective variety to admit a lifting to characteristic 0, in terms of the structure of its etale fundamental group as a profinite group. We will finally touch on some open questions.