Colloquia/Seminars
Time: 11:00am, May 27, 2024
Venue: Lecture Hall, Shanghai Brain Center
Speaker: Prof. Athanasios Fokas
Dept. of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge, UK
Biography:
Prof. Athanasios Fokas has a B.S. in Aeronautics from Imperial College (1975), a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from California Institute of Technology (1979) and an M.D. from the University of Miami (1986). He also has eight honorary degrees. In 1978 he was appointed a Saul Kaplun Fellow at the Department of Applied Mathematics at Caltech. In the period 1985-1993 he was Professor and Chairman of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of Clarkson University. In 1995 he was appointed to a Chair in Applied Mathematics at Imperial College and in 2002 he became the first holder of the inaugural Chair of Nonlinear Mathematical Science at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics of the University of Cambridge. Since 2015 he has also been an Adjunct Professor of the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of South California. He held visiting positions at Stanford and Harvard Universities. He is a member of the Academy of Athens and of the three major European Academies, including Academia Europaea. He is a Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and of the American Mathematical Society. in 2000 he was awarded the Naylor Prize of the London Mathematical Society (the previous recipient was Steven Hawking) and in 2023 the Blaise Pascal Medal of the European Academy of Sciences, “for the Fokas method, which is considered the most important development in the solution of partial differential equations since Fourier, Laplace and Cauchy”. He is the 2024 recipient of the SIAM’s Kruscal Award/Lecture “for his contributions to the development of the inverse scattering transform, for his new method for boundary-value problems, and for his work on the asymptotics of the Riemann zeta function.” He has been awarded the Excellence Prize of the Academy of Athens and the Aristeion Prize of the Bodossaki Foundation. He has been decorated with the Order of Phoenix by the President of the Hellenic Republic. In 2015 he was awarded a Senior EPSRC Fellowship which allowed him for six years to concentrate on his research without any teaching and administrative responsibilities. He has published in a remarkably broad range of topics in Mathematics, Physics, Engineering, Biology, Medicine, Philosophy, and Arts.
Abstract:
Visual perception will be used to show that every conscious experience is preceded by an unconscious process. In particular, in visual perception- which is achieved via the deconstruction of a given percept followed by its reconstruction- about a third of second after an unconscious reconstruction, the unconscious informs consciousness of the given percept. At this moment, the first ‘big bang’ takes place: awareness.
Many of our evolutionary predecessors possess consciousness. So why do we differ from them qualitatively? Many scholars have highlighted language as the key difference between us and other creatures possessing consciousness. In my opinion, this is not entirely correct. Instead, I propose that we possess a predisposition to construct real versions of our mental images and their unconscious forms, or to assign to them specific symbols. I label the emerging constructions or symbols, meta-representations. This is the second ‘big bang’ of our mental evolution, which in addition to language, includes the meta-representations of mathematics, computers, technology, and arts. The meta-representaion of Artificial Intelligence will be briefly discussed.