Incontri con la scienzaall’Istituto Italiano di Cultura

Encounters with science at the IIC

A mathematical bloomsday walk In Italian Piergiorgio Odifreddi

Join us for a mathematical journey (in Italian) through the Dublin pathways of Ulysses. Italian mathematician and writer Piergiorgio Odifreddi returns to Dublin for an evening dedicated to the pursuit of numbers in Joyce’s work. With particular reference to the Ithaca chapter in Ulysses, Odifreddi will discuss Mr Bloom’s fascination for orders of magnitude, distances, the squaring of the circle, kinetics, astronomical numbers and we will discover that in Joyce’s masterpiece there is much more mathematics than we would expect.

Thursday 16th June - 6.30pmItalian Institute of CultureFree Admission - RSVP iicdublino@esteri.it

Benedetto Scimemi

Tuesday 21st June - 6.30pmItalian Institute of CultureFree Admission - RSVP iicdublino@esteri.it

The Boundaries of Babel. The brain and the enigma of impossible languagesAndrea Moro

One of the major discoveries of modern linguistics is that languages cannot vary unboundedly: every grammar must meet a common set of principles which generate an enormous but not infinite number of combinations in a modular way, admitting some intertwined degree of freedom. The system is so complex that this underlying uniformity has escaped the attention of scholars for centuries.A crucial question that naturally arises from this state of affairs is whether the limit of variation among grammars is accidental or biologically driven.

Wednesday 22nd June - 6.30pmItalian Institute of CultureFree Admission - RSVP iicdublino@esteri.it

The Garden of Biodiversity: the co-evolution of humans and plantsTelmo Pievani

The new Garden of Biodiversity at the Historical Botanical Garden of Padua (the most ancient University Garden in the world and inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List) is an interactive and multimedia science centre dedicated to the astonishing biodiversity of plants and their connections to human evolution. Evolutionist and philosopher of biology Telmo Pievani will discuss the history of the co-evolution between humans and plants.

Thursday 30th June - 6.30pmItalian Institute of CultureFree Admission - RSVP iicdublino@esteri.it

11 Fitzwilliam Square East, Dublin 2 +353 (1) 662 0509 / 662 1507

iicdublino@esteri.itwww.iicdublino.esteri.it