Lecture

The Vera List Center launches its fall 2010 season with a new lecture series, co-organized with the School of Art, Media, and Technology and the Fine Arts Program Parsons. Focused on art and science, the series captures the increasingly trans-disciplinary nature of scientific, academic, artistic, and cultural practices and, in particular, focuses on the complex cross-disciplinary settings for arts production in contemporary life. Clustered around specific subjects such as geophysics, systems theory, economics, and the physics of time, the lectures are presented in thematic pairs, one week apart from one another. Members of The New School’s acclaimed faculty alternate with external scholars, experts, and artists. All lectures are open to the public.

Tatiana Lyubetskaya, the first lecturer, introduces the major concepts that form the basis of scientific thinking such as data, model, assumption, and proof before examining specific cases of interdisciplinary scientific investigations in the fields of geology, geochemistry and geophysics. The common ground between these subjects is found in the principles of mathematical analysis, which allow processing and manipulating different kinds of information in order to construct theoretical models describing the behavior of complex systems. The fundamental problem of determining the chemical composition of the Earth and its applications in different Earth sciences serves as an example. Theoretical modeling of geological processes such as mountain building and erosion will be examined as it illuminates the ways in which a scientific problem is formulated and how possible solutions are constructed and tested.

Tatiana Lyubetskaya graduated from Moscow State University in 2000. In 2000-2003, Lyubetskaya worked as a researcher at the Oceanology Institute in Moscow and participated in the BEAR EUROPEPROBE project. She received her PhD in geophysics from Yale University in 2010. Lyubetskaya was awarded the William Ebenezer Ford prize for research in mineralogy in 2008 and the Elias Loomis Prize for Excellence in Studies of Physics of the Earth in 2009; her papers are published in the American Journal of Science, the Journal of Geophysical Research and the Journal of Petrology.