Professor Péter Érdi, Kalamazoo College Grey College
October – December 2012
Péter Érdi has degrees in chemistry and chemical cybernetics from Budapest, Hungary. In 2002 he was appointed as the Henry R. Luce Professor of Complex Systems Studies at Kalamazoo College (Michigan, USA). Previously he was the Head of Department of Biophysics, KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1993-2011). He is also the Co-Director of the Budapest Semester in Cognitive Science.
Professor Érdi is a member of the Board of Governors for the International Neural Network Society, has served in the FENSIBRO European Neuroscience Schools Programme Committee (2008-2012), and is a member of the Advisory Board: Springer Complexity: Cutting Across All Traditional Disciplines. In April 2012 Érdi delivered the Luigi M. Ricciardi memorial lecture as a keynote speaker at the European Meetings on Cybernetics and Systems Research in Vienna.
Professor Érdi’s research interests are interdisciplinary and are reflected in his major publications, including Mathematical Models of Chemical Reactions: Theory and Applications of Deterministic and Stochastic Models (with János Tóth, 1989); Neural Organization: Structure, Function, and Dynamics (with Michael A Arbib and János Szentágothai, 1997/98) and Complexity Explained (2007).
Professor Érdi’s main research field is computational neuroscience, and more recently he has been working on understanding psychiatric symptoms based on the concepts of dynamical diseases and/or functional disconnectivities. Érdi also continues an active research program on computational social science. He continues to teach Complex Systems, Cognitive Science, Computational Neuroscience, Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos Theory.
At the IAS he will work on a book about the scope and limits of a dynamical approach to temporal changes of social systems.
Professor Robert Hannah, University of Otago St. Mary’s College January - March 2013
Robert Hannah is a professor of Classics at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. After gaining his BA in Greek at Otago, he studied classical archaeology at Oxford, and has been a member of staff in the Classics Department at Otago since 1980.
He began his research career writing about works of Greek and Roman art and he continues to do so, particularly in his capacity as Honorary Curator of the Classical Collections of the Otago Museum. But he found himself early on drawn into explaining some well-known works of art which incorporated astronomical symbols of time, and these in turn attracted him to the study of the means and meanings of measuring time. His most recent publications include the books Greek and Roman Calendars: Constructions of Time in the Classical World (2005), and T
ime in Antiquity (2009).
Professor Hannah has sought to increase understanding of the everyday perception of time in ancient Greece and Rome. His work explains in detail the various instruments of time – calendars, sundials, water-clocks – which relied on often complex interrelationships between the cycles of sun, moon and stars, and it seeks to demonstrate the intimate social relationships between agricultural life, religious cult and political time. Thus his research synthesises humanistic and scientific approaches to the ancient world. His work has been recognised by the academy through his election in 2008 to a Fellowship in the Society of Antiquaries of London.
His current interests are in the ways in which the ancient Greeks and Romans situated and understood themselves in their natural and built landscapes, especially in the context of religious cult. While at the IAS he will be working on two projects. One examines conceptions of the relationship between time, eternity and the afterlife in antiquity. The second project is ‘Myth, Cult and Cosmos: astronomy in ancient Greek religion.’ The project uses astronomy as an innovative tool to help elucidate and explain Greek religious belief and practice.
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