We are pleased to announce the PhD thesis defense of Alessandro Toso. Two of his external reviewers, Jaime de la Rocha and Ayelet Landau, have generously agreed to give talks, making December 13 a densely packed day. The schedule is below.

Friday, December 13:

Visual perception is attuned to detect stimuli with high social value, such as faces, bodies and biological motion. I will discuss new findings from functional neuroimaging, eye tracking and behavioral methods on healthy adults and preverbal infants. Based on those findings, I will argue that human visual perception is further prepared to represent socially relevant (spatial) relations among multiple entities. This so-far uncharted property of human perception substantiates the construct of social vision, whereby the result of the perceptual analysis is not independent shape recognition, but an integrative structuring of information for higher-level inferential operations in social cognition.   

A lecture by Jean-Pierre Demailly of CNRS, Grenoble.

Algebraic geometry is the art of solving polynomial equations. Greek mathematicians already considered "Diophantine equations", which consist of finding integer or rational solutions. It turns out that this problem is deeply connected to the geometry of the set of complex points and to the existence of entire analytic solutions, and is usually governed by the degrees of the polynomials involved. We will describe informally some recent results on these questions.

https://www.sissa.it/news/sissa-colloquium-analytic-and-arithmetic-solutions-algebraic-equations