Lectures and Events - Williams Lecture Series

Umesh Vazirani lectures on Computation

William Bialek lectures on Computation

Wilfried Sieg lectures on Computation

The Thomas and Yvonne Williams Fund for the Advancement of Logic and Philosophy The Thomas and Yvonne Williams Fund for the Advancement of Logic and Philosophy has been established at the University of Pennsylvania to expose a wide audience to the value of the correct application of reason. The goal is to present logic as the formal study of reason and philosophy as the application of reason to significant problems in human experience.

The symposium is sponsored by The Thomas and Yvonne Williams Fund for the Advancement of Logic and Philosophy, The Provost’s Fund for the Year of Proof, and the Schools of Arts and Sciences, Engineering and Applied Science, and Law.

Scott Aaronson is the TIBCO Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at M.I.T. This year he received the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation in recognition of his work on computational complexity which explores the limits of quantum computers. He has also received the Junior Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching from M.I.T.

David Rudovsky is a Senior Fellow of the University’s Law School and one of the nation’s leading civil rights and criminal defense attorneys. In 1986, he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for his work on human rights. This year, he received his fifth Harvey Levin Award for Excellence in Teaching from the Law School; he has also received the University’s Lindback Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Solomon Feferman is the Patrick Suppes Family Professor of Humanities and Sciences, Emeritus and Professor of Mathematics and Philosophy, Emeritus at Stanford University. He was awarded the 2003 Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences “for his works on the arithmetization of metamathematics, transfinite progressions of theories, and predicativity.”

Dennis DeTurck is the Robert A. Fox Leadership Professor in the School of Arts and Sciences of the University of Pennsylvania, Professor of Mathematics, and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. This year he and his coauthors, Herman Gluck, Daniel Pomerleano and David Shea Vela-Vick, were awarded the Chauvenet Prize of the Mathematical Association of America for their paper “The Four Vertex Theorem and its Converse.” He has also received the SAS Ira Abrams Award for Distinguished Teaching, the University’s Lindback Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the M.A.A.’s Haimo Award for Distinguished Teaching.

The symposium is sponsored by The Thomas and Yvonne Williams Fund for the Advancement of Logic and Philosophy, The Provost’s Fund for the Year of Proof, and the Schools of Arts and Sciences, Engineering and Applied Science, and Law.