Effective this month, there have been a number of changes to Institute leadership we’d like to recognize. First, Anthony Skelton has officially completed a 4-year term as the Institute’s Associate Director. In this role, he has not only served on the Steering Committee, but he has also coordinated our annual speakers series and Rotman lectures. During this time, Anthony arranged talks by internationally recognized scholars from philosophy, psychology, physics, economics, and other fields of interest. The success of these visits have not only resulted in increased engagement with members of our community, they have also provided fantastic opportunities for collaboration among our faculty, postdocs, and graduate students with scholars from a range of disciplines. Please join us in thanking Anthony for the tremendous amount of time and energy he has devoted to the Institute in this capacity. And at the same time, please join us in congratulating Eric Desjardins, who has taken over the role of Associate Director, and has already begun planning the speakers series for the upcoming academic year. Please also join us in congratulating Jackie Sullivan and Klodian Coko who have both just been elected by acclamation to the Rotman Institute’s Steering Committee as faculty and postdoctoral fellow representatives, respectively. Finally, we’d like to thank and recognize Justin Donhauser whose term serving as the previous postdoctoral fellow representative ended this past month.
All other news for our members is listed below alphabetically.
Christian Ardelean gave a talk, titled “On the Similarity Clauses of Circulant Bohemian Matrices”, at the Ontario Research Centre for Computer Algebra on Friday, July 27.
Eunice Chan gave a talk titled, “Algebraic Linearizations of Matrix Polynomials”, at the Universidad de Cantabria, in Santander, Spain, and at the Bohemian Matrices and Applications Workshop, held in Manchester, UK on June 20 – 22.
From July 9 – 12, Klodian Coko attended the 12th Congress of The International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science (HOPOS), held at the University of Groningen, in Groningen, Netherlands, where he presented the paper “The Method of Hypothesis in the 19th Century: Whewell, Mill, Herschel, and Peirce on the Consilience Criterion”
Rob Corless gave a talk titled “The Functional Inverse of the Gamma Function”, at the Universidad de Cantabria, in Santander, Spain.
Rob Corless gave a talk titled Bohemian Matrix Families A specialization in the sense of Pólya at the Bohemian Matrices and Applications Workshop, held in Manchester, UK on June 20 – 22. (See video of this talk here.)
A paper by Rob Corless, titled Revisiting the discharge time of a cylindrical leaking bucket or, “one does not simply call dsolve into Mordor.”, was published in ACM Communications in Computer Algebra.
Michael Cuffaro gave a presentation titled “Classical Simulations of Quantum Correlations”, at the Workshop on Analogue Experimentation, held at the University of Bristol, on July 16 – 17.
On July 4-6, Michael Cuffaro attended the Symposium on the Philosophy of Open Quantum Systems, at the British Society for the Philosophy of Science (BSPS) Annual Conference held at Oxford University, where he gave a presentation titled “The Open Systems View as Fundamental” (with Stephan Hartmann).
Michael Cuffaro and Philippos Papagiannopoulos published a proceedings volume in the journal Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science, based on the workshop they organised in Fontainebleau, France in June, the 9th International Workshop on Physics and Computation.
Rotman alumnae Alkistis Elliot-Graves and Melissa Jacquart both attended Modeling Reality, a joint workshop of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Pennsylvania, held July 1-3 in Israel. Alkistis gave a talk entitled “What are General Models About?”, and Melissa gave a talk entitled “Modeling and Realism in Astrophysics: The Case of Dark Matter”.
A paper by Becky Ellis, titled “Save the Bees? Agrochemical Corporations and the Debate Over Neonicotinoids in Ontario” was just recently published in a journal of political ecology, Capitalism Nature Socialism. (A pdf of the paper is available here.)
Craig Fox attended the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice (SPSP) Seventh Biennial Conference held on June 30 – July 2 at Ghent University, Belgium. He was a commentator in the author meets critics symposium on the book “Rock, Bone, and Ruin: An Optimist’s Guide to the Historical Sciences” (Adrian Currie, MIT Press, 2018).
Yousuf Hasan attended the 8th conference of the Société de philosophie analytique, held July 2 – 5 in Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium), where he delivered a talk titled “Applying Carnap’s Internal/External Distinction to Mathematics”.
On July 4-6, Yousuf Hasan attended the Symposium on the Philosophy of Open Quantum Systems, at the British Society for the Philosophy of Science (BSPS) Annual Conference held at Oxford University, where he gave a presentation titled “Carnap on the Reality of Atoms”.
The CPSX Summer Space Explorers Camp is underway, and Rotman K-12 volunteers Yousuf Hasan, Matthew Howery, and Aubrie Schettler have already participated in two sessions with our spacetime demonstration. We’re very excited to once again take part in this fantastic outreach activity, and will have more details and photos next month after the summer camp has concluded.
Former Rotman postdoc, Lisa Forsberg, presented a paper at the 2018 Conference of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies on July 24 at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.
Lisa Forsberg gave a presentation titled “Neurointerventions and English civil law on consent” at the Institute of Medical Ethics 2018 Summer (Research) Conference, Oxford, 19-20 June 2018 (as part of the panel Consensual and Non-Consensual Neurointerventions, with Tom Douglas, Jonathan Pugh and Viktor Ivankovic).
Lisa Forsberg gave an invited talk, titled “Decisions about providing abortion: conscience claims, clinical judgements, and judgements about prudential value”, at Pembroke College, Oxford, on May 15.
Stathis Psillos participated as Faculty in the Central European University Summer School on The History and Metaphysics of the Concept of Laws of Nature, which took place in Budapest, from July 2 – 10.
Chris Smeenk was an invited speaker at the International Summer School on the Philosophy, History, and Sociology of Particle Physics, hosted by the research unit, EHLC (The Epistemology of the Large Hadron Collider). The institute was held July 23 – 3o at the Tagungszentrum Auf dem Heiligen Berg, in Wuppertal, Germany.
An op-ed by former Rotman postdoc, Catherine Stinson, titled “Is my fungus going viral? – Data privacy in healthcare“, was published on July 6 in The Globe and Mail.
John Thorp gave the Closing Address at a conference on Ancient Philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires, on July 6, 2018. The title of his talk was “La cama de Platón: Esencia y arquetipo en la Teoría de las Formas” (Plato’s Bed: essence and archetype in the Theory of Forms).
Pictured above: Rob Corless and Eunice Chan along with other attendees of the Bohemian Matrices and Applications Workshop; Craig Fox presenting at the SPSP Seventh Biennial Conference in Ghent; Michael Cuffaro and Philippos Papagiannopoulos at the BSPS Annual Conference in Oxford; Yousuf Hasan presenting at the BSPS Annual Conference in Oxford; John Thorp at the University of Buenos Aires; The University of Groningen (photo courtesy of Klodian Coko).
