In this colloquium, I would like to review a recently developed new interpretation of gravitational spacetime in terms of quantum entanglement. The AdS/CFT correspondence in string theory provides a simple holographic computation of entanglement entropy. This generalizes the well-known "Entropy=Area relation" of Bekenstein-Hawking and strongly suggests that a gravitational spacetime consists of infinitely many bits of quantum entanglement. Indeed, an explicit realization of this idea is provided by so called tensor networks, which is a geometrical way to describe a given wave function in quantum many-body systems. I would like to explain these recent developments. 

Chili Bowls, Hot Chocolate, Cookies, Prizes and Grames!

Title: Reflexive Polytopes and the Reflexive Dimension   

Abstract: Reflexive polytopes were first introduced in the context of theoretical physics and have since played a role in Mirror Symmetry, construction of Calabi-Yau varieties and Gorenstein polytopes.  Applications aside, reflexive polytopes are interesting combinatorial objects.  In this talk we define what it means for a polytope P to be reflexive and characterize P according to its Ehrhart series.  Then we look at the work done by Haase and Melnikov in defining the reflexive dimension of a polytope and producing lower and upper bounds.

Join the University of Kentucky Confucius Institute (UKCI) in welcoming Dr. Robin R. Wang as the first speaker in the 2015 Distinguished Scholars Series. Her lecture, entitled Yinyang: The Way of Ways, and discussion will take place on Friday, Oct. 16 from 2:30 - 4:00 pm in the Patterson Office Tower 18th Floor, West-End Lobby, with a reception to follow. Please see the attached poster for more information.  

You're 40, reminiscing with college friends about a memorable experience from 20 years ago.  One of them confesses that, just 10 years ago now, he broke into your house and kidnapped the person sleeping in your bed to use as an unwitting subject in a secret government fission project.  Lefty and Righty were successfully issued in one of the usual ways; but never woken up.  Righty was promptly destroyed, and Lefty was returned to your bed, still unconscious and none the wiser.  Here are two ways you might reply to your friend's confession.  1) I'm mad that you took such a terrible risk without consulting me, but thank goodness everything turned out okay.  2) I'm sad that my total life expectancy is 30 years shorter than I'd thought, but thanks for creating me.  I find the first reply much more natural than the second.  But I'm also terrified by the prospect of fission.  Leading theories of personal survival have a hard time accommodating both (a) the retrospective intuition that you've survived fission, and (b) the prospective intuition that it's indeterminate whether you'll survive fission.  In this talk, I show that we can coherently combine (a) and (b) by characterizing survival in terms of existence at a time, instead of numerical identity over time.  A simple exdurantist or stage-theoretic model can be used to illustrate consistency.  And taking care to distinguish the object language of the theory itself from the metalanguage we use to model it helps neutralize potential objections, and clarify certain confusions in the traditional literature on personal identity.  Zooming further out, these considerations suggest that Lewis may have been wrong to claim that fission and kindred puzzles of persistence aren't essentially "about identity".  Here and elsewhere in metaphysics, the way forward may involve outgrowing the habit of defining our theoretical options in terms of identity.

Starting in the early 1990’s with the publication of Axel Honneth’s landmark book The Struggle for Recognition and Charles Taylor’s seminal essay “The Politics of Recognition”, there has been a resurgence of interest in what might broadly be called “recognition theory,” a tradition with roots in Fichte and Hegel. It is my contention, however, that there are some important and recurring weaknesses in much of this recent literature on recognition that causes it to provide what is ultimately a flawed account of oppression and liberation. Patchen Markell’s Bound by Recognition, in particular, stands as an excellent exemplar of this general trend in the recent literature.  Using his work as a paradigm case, this paper will articulate a response to Markell’s critique of recognition theory that I believe is representative of general weaknesses in much of the contemporary discussions of the topic. I will argue that these contemporary critics are working with a deep, yet common, misreading of the Hegelian roots of recognition theory, and that a return to Hegel's texts will allow for an account of recognition that holds more promise for the theorization of oppression and liberation. 

Title of talk: Homology of Filters in the Partition Lattice.

Ordering of charge/spin/orbital degrees of freedom in complex materials accompanies domains and domain walls associated with the directional variants (Zm) and also antiphases (Zn). It has been recently realized that nontrivial ZmxZn topology can exists in large-scale real-space configurations of domains and domains walls of complex materials. Furthermore, the vertices where domain walls merge can be considered as topological defects with well-defined vorticities (Zl vortices). I will present the recently-discovered examples of ZmxZn domains and Zl vortices in complex materials. We will also discuss emergent physical properties of domain walls, which are distinctly different from those of domains.

The University of Kentucky's Gaines Center for the Humanities and the Department of Gender and Women's Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences are teaming up with the Office of LGBTQ* Resources, the Martin Luther King Center, the African American and Africana Studies Program and Black Student Union to present three events exploring violence against members of the LGBTQ* and Black communities as part of a series of workshops on violence and the human condition. 

Upcoming Nov 16 and Nov 18 Events:



Fittingly with the U.S. Supreme Court simultaneously deciding to uphold the right for same-sex marriage and to retract important aspects of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the second part of the series is "Policing Black Bodies." This panel discussion will be at 2 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 18, at Young Library Auditorium. The three scholars featured in this event will provide critical commentary, transnational connections and historical contexts for current struggles with violence against African and African-American communities. A Q&A session will be held at the end of this event, followed by a reception.

Melynda J. Price, director of the African American and Africana Studies Program and the Robert E. Harding Jr. Professor of Law at UK, will open the panel for "Policing Black Bodies." She is the author of "At the Cross: Race, Religion and Citizenship in the Politics of the Death Penalty."

The second speaker of the session will be Melissa Stein, assistant professor of gender and women’s studies at UK and author of "Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830-1934," newly published this fall.

Kevin Mumford, professor of history at University of Illinois and author of numerous books on Black history, including "Newark: A History of Race, Rights, and Riots in America," rounds out the panel.

A special ancillary event, a film screening of the documentary "Let the Fire Burn" and a poster session analyzing the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement, will be held in the days leading up to the second panel discussion. The film will be screened at 6 p.m. Monday, Nov. 16, at Young Library Auditorium. The poster session will be held in the adjacent Alumni Gallery and will feature poster presentations of research on recent killings of unarmed black people in the United States by students currently enrolled in Stein’s "GWS 595 - Crime & Punishment: Race & Ferguson in Historical Context."

Carol Mason, department chair of Gender & Women's Studies, radiates enthusiasm about the student engagement in this series. "I am so grateful for Dr. Stein for her innovative pedagogy and very excited to see the posters that students have created in her class on 'Crime and Punishment.' This is the kind of real-world application of interdisciplinary scholarship that makes gender and women’s studies such a transformative experience for students."

The College of Arts and Sciences and the Gaines Center are sponsoring a year of programming around the broad theme of "Violence and the Human Condition." Over the course of the 2015-16 academic year, faculty members from many different UK departments will collaborate with each other and with visiting experts from other universities in a series of mini-conferences and workshops that will be free and open to the campus as a whole.

The partnership will explore the theme of violence across many different registers — architecture and conflict, political violence, war and gender, transnational dimensions of violence, the intersections of violence in Latin America, and the notion of war without end as a metaphor in contemporary life.