A discussion on Professor Marlene Daut’s new book The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe.

Talk Title: Under Pressure: Materials Chemistry at Extreme Conditions

Speaker: Sanath Devalapurkar (Harvard University)

Date: Wednesday, April 30, 2025 Location: 46-3002 (Singleton Auditorium)Speaker: Oliver Rollins, Ph.D. Affiliation: Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society (STS), MITHosts: Dr. Mriganka Sur, Dr. Rebecca SaxeTalk title: What Antiracism means for (Neuro)science Today Abstract: Historically, race—especially its erroneous interpretation as a biological reality—has played a key role in shaping scientific research about the brain. Today, neuroscience, like other related fields of biological inquiry, not only rejects its racist past but also seeks to clarify that race holds little scientific relevance in the present. In response to the Summer of 2020, for example, major scientific journals (e.g., Nature, Science, and JAMA) and institutions issued calls to better recognize and combat the underlying harms of scientific racism. However, our current sociopolitical environment raises questions about whether and how neuroscience can genuinely confront its past and contemporary interactions with race. By emphasizing how racial inequality can be perpetuated and confronted through everyday technological practices involving the brain, I aim to provide evidence of the necessity for neuroscientists and social scientists to think more collectively, critically, and creatively about the intersections between (neuro)science and the politics of social difference.

Time: 3:30 PMLocation: Cambridge, MA

Speaker: Ulrich Jentshura (Missouri S&T)Title: Resurgent Expansions and TransseriesAbstract:Traditionally, the divergent perturbation series of a quartic anharmonic oscillator has been used as an example of a factorially divergent, alternating perturbation series describing an energy level of a quantum mechanical system. The Bender-Wu formulas have been used in order to connect the "stable" domain of positive coupling, where the resonance energy eigenvalues are real rather than complex, with the "unstable" domain of negative coupling, where the resonance energy eigenvalues are complex; the latter describe unstable states whose resonance energy has a nonvanishing imaginary part. The imaginary part of the resonance energy describes the decay width. In recent years, the concept of a perturbation series has been generalized to include series with perturbative (power) terms and nonperturbative exponential factors of the form exp(-A/g), where A is the so-called instanton action and g is the coupling parameter. These generalized perturbation series ("transseries") are able to describe, analytically, the manifestly complex resonance energies in the unstable domain. Such generalized perturbation series are even able to describe anharmonic oscillator energies in cases where the perturbation series vanishes to all orders, but the ground-state energy is manifestly nonzero.