Announcement: Graduate seminar series

This fall Dr. Warren Smith of the NEC Research Institute will give a
series of graduate seminars at Princeton University (applied math) on

        COMPUTING AND THE LAWS OF PHYSICS.

This series is intended for graduate students (or advanced undergrads)
in computer science, math, applied math, and/or physics.

Questions that the seminars will address:
 What do computer science and information theory have to say about
 the laws of physics? How do the laws of physics impose fundamental
 limits on computer performance - or allow greater performance than
 might be expected?

Home page with more info (e.g. prerequisites):
   http://www.neci.nj.nec.com/homepages/wds/pu-course.html

Possible topics:
 Church's thesis, Information/Entropy, computing with
 unreliable computational elements, VLSI theory, quantum
 computing, Josephson junction electronics, reversible computing
 and energy dissipation in computers, bounds on memory capacity and
 information flux. (Giant lists of possible topics on the web page.)

The series will start out with some introductory presentations - the
content of these will be decided duirng or after the organizational
meeting (see below) and will depend on the backgrounds (or
non-backgrounds) of the participants.  (One possibility would be to
start out with special topics that are comprehensible with very little
background, such as the paper "Church's thesis meets the N-body
problem", available electronically at
http://www.neci.nj.nec.com/homepages/wds/church.ps . Another is to
devote several lectures to "a quick tour through quantum mechanics", "a
quick tour of undecidability", etc.)  Depending on student interest, we
can then proceed further in any of the directions mentioned above.

Participants in the seminar series will be strongly encouraged to do
homework problem sets (which will be returned with corrections;
interesting homework solutions can become presentations to the
seminar), and, for interested participants, a larger scale project also.

If you'd like to know more about this exciting area, come check out the
seminar series!

Organizational meeting:
 Date, Time, Place: Friday afternoon 3 PM, Sept 18, 
 401 Fine Hall. [NOT in the 3rd floor common room as
 reported in previous announcements.]

If you'd like more information prior to the organizational meeting, or
if you can't make that meeting yet would like to participate in the
seminar series, please contact Warren D. Smith, NEC Research Institute
(Room 2B05) 4 Independence Way Princeton NJ 08540 USA,
Phone: (609) 951-2717   Web: http://www.neci.nj.nec.com/homepages/wds
Email: wds@research.NJ.NEC.COM  [best method]
Fax:   (609) 951-2496  ("for W.D.Smith 2B05")