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Public lecture series draws students, professors,
professionals, highschoolers
It's Wednesday night, and A10 Jadwin
is filling up fast.Well before the speaker is scheduled to
start, there's not a seat to be had; nearly 200 students,
professors, professionals and even local highschool students
cram themselves into every bit of floor space.
A large man with a wiry gray beard and a
T-shirt printed with a design by M.C. Escher walks to the
front of the hall: John Conway, John Von Neumann Professor
in Applied and Computational Mathematics. With a brief quip
about how he wasn't sure he'd have an audience, he begins to
discuss the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes. (Photo
by Peter Murphy) [>>more]
Real-world problems
PICASSO initiative fosters interdisciplinary research
related to computer science
When Jaswinder Singh was a graduate
student at Stanford, his adviser encouraged his choice of
research but warned him that it was a risky one.
Singh spent many hours in the
astrophysics department struggling with something called the
N-body problem. The trouble was that his field wasn't
astrophysics; it was computer science. [>>more]
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Concerts are like big dinner parties--except 800 people
are coming," says University Concert Manager Nathan Randall.
"Putting together an audience and performance is like
orchestrating a successful banquet."
As a one-time professional chef, Randall
should know. But with more than 200 events a year to
schedule in Alexander and Taplin auditoriums, he scarcely
has time to crack a cookbook these days. Out of a
white-siding building tucked behind a service station on
Alexander Street, he manages the Friends of Music at
Princeton and Princeton University Concerts, as well as
parceling out space to other groupsfrom on campus and off,
and not always musical. [>>more]
Athletics
Field hockey. The Tigers defeated Virginia Commonwealth 5-1 November 1, Columbia 6-1 November 3 and Pennsylvania 4-0 November 5, clinch-ing a share of their sixth consecutive Ivy League title. (11-6, 6-1 Ivy)
Football. Princeton lost to Penn 41-13 November 6. (3-5, 1-4 Ivy)
Soccer. The men's team defeated Penn 1-0 November 6 for its first 10-win season since 1995, the last time it won the Ivy League championship. The women lost to Penn 1-0 November 6 but finished the regular season with their first 12-win season since 1989 and a berth in their third NCAA tournament, the first since 1983. (Men: 10-4-1, 5-1 Ivy; women: 12-4-1, 4-2-1 Ivy)
In the news
From its lonely
perch high above earth, NASA's orbiting Hubble Space
Telescope is opening a view of the universe that humans
could only dream about for thousands of years.
Nearly 10 years after it was launched,
Hubble is turning in discovery after discovery about how the
cosmos works. The telescope is surpassing the expectations
of even the astronomers who nursed it from concept in the
1970s to reality in the 1990s.
The accolades are in stark contrast to
the torrent of ridicule that greeted the telescope and
haunted NASA shortly after Hubble was put into orbit 365
miles above Earth in April 1990. A defective mirror blurred
the telescope's vision so badly that critics called Hubble
an example of big science gone bad.
But now the aging telescope is
transforming even the way humans see themselves in the
universe.
"The scale of Hubble's images is so
enormous and so incredible that it makes human events, even
who wins the World Series, seem to be of no importance by
comparison," says John Bahcall, a professor of natural
sciences [now visiting lecturer with rank of professor
in astrophysical sciences] at Princeton
University who helped lead the push to get Hubble funded
nearly three decades ago.
"A Decade of Wonders," by Paul
Hoverstein,
USA Today, November 5
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