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Simonyi Professorship For The Public Understanding Of Science
The Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science is a chair at the University of Oxford. The chair was established in 1995 for the ethologist Richard Dawkins by an endowment from Charles Simonyi. The aim of the Professorship is 'to communicate science to the public without, in doing so, losing those elements of scholarship which constitute the essence of true understanding'. It is a position that had been endowed by Charles Simonyi with the express intention that the holder "be expected to make important contributions to the public understanding of some scientific field", and that its first holder should be Richard Dawkins. History Richard Dawkins explained the history of the creation of the chair in a chapter of his memoirs, '' Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science''.Richard Dawkins, '' Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science'', Bantam Press, 2015 (). Chapter "Simonyi Professor", pages 271-307. In 2008, Dawkins retired and the Oxford mathematic ...
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University Of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, second-oldest continuously operating university globally. It expanded rapidly from 1167, when Henry II of England, Henry II prohibited English students from attending the University of Paris. When disputes erupted between students and the Oxford townspeople, some Oxford academics fled northeast to Cambridge, where they established the University of Cambridge in 1209. The two English Ancient university, ancient universities share many common features and are jointly referred to as ''Oxbridge''. The University of Oxford comprises 43 constituent colleges, consisting of 36 Colleges of the University of Oxford, semi-autonomous colleges, four permanent private halls and three societies (colleges that are depar ...
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Carolyn Porco
Carolyn C. Porco (born March 6, 1953) is an American planetary scientist who explores the outer Solar System, beginning with her imaging work on the Voyager missions to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in the 1980s. She led the imaging science team on the '' Cassini'' mission in orbit around Saturn. She is an expert on planetary rings and the Saturnian moon, Enceladus. She has co-authored more than 110 scientific papers on subjects ranging from the spectroscopy of Uranus and Neptune, the interstellar medium, the photometry of planetary rings, satellite/ring interactions, computer simulations of planetary rings, the thermal balance of Triton's polar caps, heat flow in the interior of Jupiter, and a suite of results on the atmosphere, satellites, and rings of Saturn from the ''Cassini'' imaging experiment. In 2013, Cassini data confirmed a 1993 prediction by Porco and Mark Marley that acoustic oscillations within the body of Saturn are responsible for creating particular fe ...
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Science In Society
Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which study the physical world, and the social sciences, which study individuals and societies. While referred to as the formal sciences, the study of logic, mathematics, and theoretical computer science are typically regarded as separate because they rely on deductive reasoning instead of the scientific method as their main methodology. Meanwhile, applied sciences are disciplines that use scientific knowledge for practical purposes, such as engineering and medicine. The history of science spans the majority of the historical record, with the earliest identifiable predecessors to modern science dating to the Bronze Age in Egypt and Mesopotamia (). Their contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine entered and shaped the Greek natural philo ...
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Professorships At The University Of Oxford
Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a 'person who professes'. Professors are usually experts in their field and teachers of the highest rank. In most systems of academic ranks, "professor" as an unqualified title refers only to the most senior academic position, sometimes informally known as "full professor". In some countries and institutions, the word ''professor'' is also used in titles of lower ranks such as associate professor and assistant professor; this is particularly the case in the United States, where the unqualified word is also used colloquially to refer to associate and assistant professors as well, and often to instructors or lecturers. Professors often conduct original research and commonly teach undergraduate, postgraduate, or professional courses in their fields of expertise. In uni ...
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Melissa Franklin
Melissa Eve Bronwen Franklin (born September 30, 1956) is a Canadian experimental particle physicist and the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University. In 1992, Franklin became the first woman to receive tenure in the physics department at Harvard University and she served as chair of the department from 2010 to 2014. While working at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Chicago, her team found some of the first evidences for the existence of the top quark. In 1993, Franklin was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society. She is a member of the CDF (Fermilab) and ATLAS (CERN) collaborations. Early life and education Franklin was born in Edmonton, Alberta and grew up first in Vancouver, British Columbia and then Toronto, Ontario, where her family moved in 1962. Her father, Stephen Franklin, was a British-born journalist who worked as drama critic for the ''Ottawa Journal'' and later as staff writer and editor for ''Weekend'' magazine. Her mother, Elsa, was ...
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David J
David John Haskins (born 24 April 1957, Northampton, Northamptonshire, England), better known as David J, is a British alternative rock musician, producer, and writer. He is the bassist for the gothic rock band Bauhaus (band), Bauhaus and for Love and Rockets (band), Love and Rockets. He has composed the scores for a number of plays and films, and also wrote and directed his own plays, ''Silver for Gold (The Odyssey of Edie Sedgwick)'', in 2008, which was restaged at REDCAT in Los Angeles in 2011, and ''The Chanteuse and The Devil's Muse'' in 2011. His artwork has been shown in galleries internationally, and he has been a resident DJ at venues such as the Knitting Factory. David J has released a number of singles and solo albums, and in 1990 he released one of the first No. 1 hits on the then nascent Modern Rock Tracks charts, with "I'll Be Your Chauffeur". His most recent single, "The Day That David Bowie Died" entered the UK vinyl singles chart at number 4 in 2016. The trac ...
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Eric Weinstein
Eric Ross Weinstein (; born October 26, 1965) is an American investor and financial executive. , he was managing director for the American venture capital firm Thiel Capital. Weinstein hosted a podcast called ''The Portal'', coined the term " intellectual dark web", and has proposed a theory of everything called "Geometric Unity" that has largely been met with skepticism in the scientific community. Education Weinstein received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1992 under the supervision of Raoul Bott. Reprinted in: In his dissertation, "Extension of Self-Dual Yang-Mills Equations Across the Eighth Dimension", Weinstein showed that the self-dual Yang–Mills equations were not peculiar to dimension four and admitted generalizations to higher dimensions. Career Finance In 2013, Weinstein was working as an economist and consultant at the Natron Group, a New York City–based hedge fund. , Weinstein is the managing director for Thiel Capital, a venture capital f ...
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Luc Steels
Luc Steels (born in 1952) is a Belgian scientist and artist. Steels is considered a pioneer of Artificial Intelligence in Europe who has made contributions to expert systems, behavior-based robotics, artificial life and evolutionary computational linguistics. He was a fellow of the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies ICREA associated as a research professor with the Institute for Evolutionary Biology (UPF/CSIC) in Barcelona. He was formerly founding Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and founding director of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris. Steels has also been active in the arts collaborating with visual artists and theater makers and composing music for opera. Biography Steels obtained a master's degree in Computer Science at MIT, specializing in AI under the supervision of Marvin Minsky and Carl Hewitt. He obtained a Ph.D. at the University of Antwerp with a thesis in computational linguis ...
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David Spiegelhalter
Sir David John Spiegelhalter (born 16 August 1953) is a British statistician and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. From 2007 to 2018 he was Winton Professorship of the Public Understanding of Risk, Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk in the Faculty of Mathematics, University of Cambridge, Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Spiegelhalter is an ISI highly cited researcher. He is currently Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences (Cambridge), Centre for Mathematical Sciences at Cambridge. On 27 May 2020 he joined the UK Statistics Authority#Current board members, board of the UK Statistics Authority as a non-executive director for a period of three years, a term which was extended through to 2026. Early life and education Spiegelhalter was born on 16 August 1953. He was educated at Barnstaple Grammar School, a State school, state grammar school in Barnstaple, Devon, from 1 ...
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Christof Koch
Christof Koch ( ; born November 13, 1956) is an American cognitive scientist, neurophysiologist and computational neuroscientist best known for his work on the neural basis of consciousness. He was the president and chief scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. He remains at the Institute as a Meritorious Investigator. He is also the Chief Scientist of the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation in Santa Monica, that funds research meant to alleviate suffering, anxiety and other forms of distress in all people. From 1986 until 2013, he was a professor at the California Institute of Technology. Early life and education Koch was born in the Midwestern United States, and subsequently was raised in the Netherlands, Germany, Canada, and Morocco. Koch is the son of German parents; his father was a diplomat, as is his older brother Michael. He was raised as a Roman Catholic and attended a Jesuit high school in Morocco. His interest in consciousness commenced as a child when ...
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Timothy Gowers
Sir William Timothy Gowers, (; born 20 November 1963) is a British mathematician. He is the holder of the Combinatorics chair at the Collège de France, a director of research at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1998, he received the Fields Medal for research connecting the fields of functional analysis and combinatorics. Education Gowers attended King's College School, Cambridge, as a choirboy in the choir of King's College, Cambridge, King's College choir, and then Eton College as a King's Scholar, where he was taught mathematics by Norman Routledge. In 1981, Gowers won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad with a perfect score. He completed his PhD, with a dissertation on ''Symmetric Structures in Banach Spaces'' at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1990, supervised by Béla Bollobás. Career and research After his PhD, Gowers was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College. From 1991 until his return to ...
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