Initiative in Innovative Computing Colloquium Wednesday, October 1, 2008 at 4pm Location: 60 Oxford Street, Room 330 Brian Hayes, Senior Writer, American Scientist magazine Title: Computing in Alfonso's Universe Abstract: "If the Lord Almighty had consulted me before embarking on creation, I should have recommended something simpler." This sentiment, supposedly the response of Alfonso X, King of León and Castile, to the explanation of Ptolemaic astronomy, is likely to be shared by anyone who delves into algorithms for simulating the physical universe. Nature seems to have no difficulty with n-body problems, protein folding or fluid turbulence, but these phenomena are tedious, messy and computationally expensive when you try to capture them in code. Really serious physics, such as quantum field theory, gets far worse. The very difficulty of some of these problems may tell us something about the connections between physics and computation. For more information: http://iic.harvard.edu/seminars/iic -colloquium-series-fall-2008-through-spring-2009/iic -colloquium-computing-alfonsos-unive _______________________________________________ iic-colloquium mailing list iic-colloquium(a)calists.harvard.edu http://calists.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/iic-colloquium