Please join us for a free event for the scientific community — graduate level and higher — at the Simons Foundation, located on 21st Street in Manhattan. Limited seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis. We encourage you to obtain tickets online now. Search by series or speaker, view the monthly calendar and access video on simonsfoundation.org.
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We are drawn to the new, the unusual, the unexpected: what we could not predict on the basis of what came before. As vast archives of our cultural past and present go online, scientists can now break out of the laboratory to see how novelty, innovation and creativity are both made and received in the real world.
To track these crucial forms of human experience, Simon DeDeo will introduce simple but powerful concepts from information theory, using examples from Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. Through collaborative case studies ranging from the speeches of the French Revolution and papers in high-energy physics to the online arguments of ‘Wikipedians’ and Breitbart commenters, he will show how these tools allow us to ask, and answer, two basic questions: Where do new ideas come from? And how do we respond when they arrive?
Simon DeDeo is assistant professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. He runs the institute’s Laboratory for Social Minds, whose collaborative work appears in journals ranging from Physical Review to Cognition and PLOS Computational Biology.
The Gerald D. Fischbach Auditorium offers accessible seating to patrons with special access needs. Please fill out the special accommodations request when ordering your ticket online. Most events in the auditorium are video recorded by the organizer, and many are photographed. The resulting media may be used by the event organizer(s) on its website(s), or elsewhere. Audio or visual recording and photography by attendees is not permitted without prior approval of the organizer. |
Gerald D. Fischbach Auditorium
Simons Foundation 160 Fifth Avenue at 21st Street, 2nd Floor New York, NY 10010 |
Inquiries: lectures@simonsfoundation.org Simons Foundation Lectures calendar Directions Follow us on Twitter |