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DTSTART:20260329T030000
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DTSTAMP:20261012T222936Z
UID:1791192600@ist.ac.at
DTSTART:20261005T113000
DTEND:20261005T123000
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Friedrich Stricker & Yuval Wigderson\nhosted by Björn
  Hof\nAbstract: Friedrich Stricker |Beyond On/Off: Multistate Molecules an
 d MaterialsA slime mold with no brain and no nervous system can still reme
 mber: Physarum polycephalum reinforces the tubes of its cytoplasmic networ
 k along paths that once carried nutrient flow\, so a stimulus encountered 
 minutes ago changes how the organism responds to a stimulus now. History i
 s written directly into the material's structure. Synthetic materials have
  rarely matched this — not because they can't respond to a cue\, but bec
 ause most are built to give one answer\, not many\, and to forget the mome
 nt the stimulus is gone.At the root of that limitation is a simple fact ab
 out energy landscapes. In a binary switch\, a stimulus drives the system a
 long one path — on to off\, off to on — so the response is always the 
 same regardless of how it got there. In a multistate system\, the same sti
 mulus can drive the system along different paths depending on kinetics\, l
 ocal environment\, and history: the landscape stops being a fixed two-well
  problem and becomes something the material can be routed through.Getting 
 there means tracing a single design logic across three length scales. At t
 he molecular level\, multistate photoswitches give us control over kinetic
 s\, absorption\, and mechanistic pathways — the raw vocabulary of reacti
 vity. Organizing those switches within ordered\, multiphase materials – 
 often liquid crystal elastomers – lets us govern how changes at the mole
 cular level propagate into changes in structural order. And by shaping how
  these material meet a stimulus — through its geometry — we convert mo
 lecular-scale reactivity into coordinated\, purposeful behavior at the mac
 roscale. Molecular design\, material organization\, and geometry aren't se
 parate levers\; each constrains and amplifies the next\, and it's this cha
 in that lets us engineer function rather than just response.This chain —
  molecule\, assembly\, geometry — is a first step toward a larger goal: 
 materials in which a past stimulus leaves a physical trace that biases the
  path taken by future stimuli\, built not from external control but from m
 olecular architecture that intrinsically encodes state. Programming reacti
 vity\, assembly\, and geometry together is how we move from isolated switc
 hes to physically intelligent\, multifunctional matter.___________________
 _____________________________________________________________Yuval Wigders
 on |Finding Structure in ChaosPareidolia refers to the human tendency to 
 see patterns in unstructured chaos. Examples of pareidolia can range from 
 the benign (seeing constellations in the night sky) to the destructive (g
 ambling one's savings on the imagined patterns of a roulette wheel's outc
 omes).However\, sometimes the patterns really are there! In fact\, in man
 y cases\, we can prove this mathematically: no matter how complex and chao
 tic a system may seem\, it must contain some given structure within it. In
  this talk\, I will give a gentle introduction to Ramsey theory\, the fasc
 inating area of mathematics that studies such theorems\, and discuss some 
 of the major questions we still cannot answer.
LOCATION:ISTA | Central Building | Raiffeisen Lecture Hall\, ISTA
ORGANIZER:diana.zubcevic@ista.ac.at
SUMMARY:Friedrich Stricker & Yuval Wigderson: Inaugural Lecture
URL:https://talks-calendar.ista.ac.at/events/6357
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