Volume 6

iTHEMS Weekly News Letter

Seminar Report

Catherine Beauchemin thumbnail

Catherine Beauchemin gave a short talk at Nerd Nite Tokyo on May 11

2018-05-21

On Friday, May 11, Catherine Beauchemin gave a short talk at Nerd Nite Tokyo. She told the public that health science has serious issues with reproducibility of experiment results, and that the research culture incentivizes positive results rather than sound experiments. This is why you get reports in successive months about how eggs are unhealthy, then healthy. Or how a medical practice used for 20 years to reduce post-surgery infections actually makes them more likely. According to Catherine, if doctors and health scientists want to be trusted more, they need to better communicate the uncertainty of results, do fewer (but larger) experiments to produce more robust results, and accept that negative results are just as worthy of publication as positive results.

She also talked about how health science has math problems. Too many people in that field don't understand math/statistics well, and blindly trust equations even when those equations are misapplied and give incorrect results. There is a big opportunity for scientists with a background in math to work with health scientists and improve the quality of research in a field that is important for everyone. She is already starting a project along these lines -- please join her to promote the goals of iTHEMS and health sciences!

And if you want to speak at a future Nerd Nite about your own research, please contact Don Warren (donald.warren@riken.jp) for information.

Nerd Nite Tokyo image

Announcement

Graduate-Level Research in Industrial Projects for Students (GRIPS)-Sendai 2018

2018-05-21

Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) at UCLA offers several versions of its Research in Industrial Projects for Students (RIPS) program, a summer research experience for students of math and related disciplines. Students work in teams on projects sponsored by industry. GRISP-Sendai 2018 on this summer will be held in Tohoku Univ. and iTHEMS cohosts this program.

Contact: Hiroshi Suito (iTHEMS Senior Research Scientist and AIMR, Tohoku Univ.)
​hiroshi.suito@tohoku.ac.jp

Upcoming Events

Math Lecture

Eren Mehmet Kıral thumbnail

Introduction to Public-Key Cryptography

Introduction to Public-Key Cryptography (3rd)

May 24 (Thu) at 10:30 - 12:00, 2018

Eren Mehmet Kıral (Visiting Researcher, RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project (AIP))

This is a series of lectures "Introduction to Public-Key Cryptography" for non-experts. It will be held twice a month (every other Thursday, about 15 times in total).

Venue: Seminar Room #160, 1F Main Research Building, RIKEN

Event Official Language: English

Workshop

iTHEMS Science Outreach Workshop 2018

June 1 (Fri) - 4 (Mon), 2018

This is a workshop in which researchers in natural and mathematical sciences and the science journalists get together and discuss outreach activities. iTHEMS started to support this annual workshop as well as the journalist in residence program from last year to establish better science communication.

Contact: Takashi Tsuboi (iTHEMS Deputy Director)

Venue: Tambara Institute of Mathematical Sciences, The University of Tokyo

Event Official Language: Japanese

Colloquium

iTHEMS Colloquium

On the interplay between intrinsic and extrinsic instabilities of spatially localized patterns

June 7 (Thu) at 15:00 - 16:30, 2018

Yasumasa Nishiura (Professor, Advanced Institute for Materials Research (AIMR), Tohoku University)

Spatially localized dissipative structures are observed in various fields, such as neural signaling, chemical reactions, discharge patterns, granular materials, vegetated landscapes, binary convection and block copolymer nanoparticles. These patterns are much simpler than single living cells, however they seem to inherit several characteristic “living state” features, such as generation of new patterns, self-replication, switching to new dynamics via collisions and adaptive morphological changes to environments. These behaviors stem from an interplay between the intrinsic instability of each localized pattern and the strength of external signals. To understand such an interplay, we explore the global geometric interrelation amongst all relevant solution branches of a corresponding system with approximate unfolding parameters. For instance, it has been uncovered that large deformation via strong collision is mapped into the network of unstable patterns in infinite dimensional space, and that an organizing center for 1D pulse generators is a double homoclinicity of butterfly type. Large deformation of patterns is unavoidable so that a global geometric structure formed by all relevant solution branches gives us much more insight rather than conventional PDE approaches. We illustrate the impact of this approach for the case of pulse generators. We also report on the recent exciting finding, namely the formation of exotic 3D nanoparticles of block copolymers caused by the interplay between internal repulsion and affinity to external solvent, which is consistent with experimental results.

Venue: Nishina Hall, 2F Nishina Building, RIKEN

Broadcast: #305-2, Computational Science Research Building, R-CCS, Kobe Campus, RIKEN / SUURI-COOL (Kyoto), #204-205, 2F Maskawa Building for Education and Research, North Campus, Kyoto University

Event Official Language: English

Math Lecture

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Theory of Operator Algebras

Theory of Operator Algebras (2nd)

June 21 (Thu) at 15:30 - 17:00, 2018

Yosuke Kubota (Research Scientist, iTHEMS)

Please note that the date and time of the 2nd lecture has been changed from May 21 10:30 to June 21 15:30.

Venue: Seminar Room #160, 1F Main Research Building, RIKEN

Event Official Language: English

Colloquium

iTHEMS Colloquium

Systems Biology of Cellular Rhythms

July 2 (Mon) at 15:00 - 16:30, 2018

Albert Goldbeter (Professor, Unit of Theoretical Chronobiology, Faculty of Sciences, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium)

Rhythmic phenomena occur at all levels of biological organization, with periods ranging from milliseconds to years. Among biological rhythms, circadian clocks, of a period close to 24h, play a key role as they allow the adaptation of living organisms to the alternation of day and night. Biological rhythms represent a phenomenon of temporal self-organization in the form of sustained oscillations of the limit cycle type. Mathematical models show how the emergent property of oscillatory behavior arises from molecular interactions in cellular regulatory networks, which explains why cellular rhythms represent a major research topic in systems biology. After providing an introduction to biological rhythms and their modeling, I will focus on mathematical models for two major examples of rhythmic behavior at the cellular level : the circadian clock and the cell cycle. The coupling of these rhythms allows for their synchronization and for the occurrence of more complex patterns of oscillatory behavior. I will discuss the reasons why models for cellular rhythms tend to become more complex, upon incorporating new experimental observations. The case of cellular rhythms allows us to compare the merits of simple versus complex models for the dynamics of biological systems.

Venue: Suzuki Umetaro Hall, 1F Bioscience Building, RIKEN

Broadcast: #305-2, Computational Science Research Building, R-CCS, Kobe Campus, RIKEN / SUURI-COOL (Kyoto), #204-205, 2F Maskawa Building for Education and Research, North Campus, Kyoto University / 2F Seminar Room, AIMR Main Building, Advanced Institute for Materials Research (AIMR), Tohoku University

Event Official Language: English

Math Lecture

Yosuke Kubota thumbnail

Theory of Operator Algebras

Theory of Operator Algebras (3rd)

July 12 (Thu) at 15:30 - 17:00, 2018

Yosuke Kubota (Research Scientist, iTHEMS)

Venue: Seminar Room #160, 1F Main Research Building, RIKEN

Event Official Language: English

Colloquium

iTHEMS Colloquium

Bell's Theorem, Entanglement, Quantum Teleportation and All That

July 19 (Thu) at 16:00 - 17:30, 2018

Anthony James Leggett (Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)

iTHEMS-CEMS Joint Colloquium.

Professor Leggett is widely recognized as a world leader in the theory of low-temperature physics, and his pioneering work on superfluidity was recognized by the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Abstract:
One of the most surprising aspects of quantum mechanics is that under certain circumstances it does not allow individual physical systems, even when isolated, to possess properties in their own right. This feature, first clearly appreciated by John Bell in 1964, has over the last half-century been tested experimentally and found (in most people's opinion) to be spectacularly confirmed. More recently it has been realized that it permits various operations which are classically impossible, such as "teleportation" and secure-in-principle cryptography.
This talk is a very basic introduction to the subject, which requires only elementary quantum mechanics.

Venue: Okochi Hall, 1F Laser Science Laboratory, RIKEN

Broadcast: #311, Computational Science Research Building, R-CCS, Kobe Campus, RIKEN / SUURI-COOL (Kyoto), #204-205, 2F Maskawa Building for Education and Research, North Campus, Kyoto University / 2F Seminar Room, AIMR Main Building, Advanced Institute for Materials Research (AIMR), Tohoku University

Event Official Language: English

Person of the Week

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Self-introduction: Takashi Okada

2018-05-21

I am Takashi Okada. I am a senior research scientist of iTHEMS from this spring. Previously, I was a postdoc researcher of Mochizuki Theoretical Biology Laboratory (April 2014 to March 2018). My original background is theoretical physics, and, before I came to Mochizuki Laboratory, I researched on particle physics and super string theory. Now, my main research subject is theoretical biology, and, especially, I am interested in biological networks, such as gene regulatory networks, metabolic networks, and signal transduction networks. I would like to understand how today’s biological networks arise through evolutionary processes. I think that iTHEMS is the best environment to study theoretical biology because life science is a very broad field that involves mathematics, physics, chemistry, statistics, and so on. I would like to learn a lot through interaction with iTHEMS members. Also, I am very happy if we can collaborate with each other.

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