A breaking piece of news appeared today on one Italian national newspaper: there is proof of Ettore Majorana being in Venezuela in the 1950s. Maybe you have never heard of him, but Majorana was a gifted Italian physicist who had produced great theoretical results in particle physics and quantum mechanics. The discovery of neutrinos was bestowed […]
Category: news
AIP2015: encouraging parents to travel
As I announced in a previous post, next May the University of Helsinki will host AIP2015, the biggest event in Inverse Problems to date. Some weeks ago I happened to read this post on the funny and interesting blog Tenure, She Wrote. Child care services at a conference? Brilliant! - I thought. I brought the idea to […]
Italian women in science who made us proud in 2014
2014 was a good year for women in science, especially in mathematics, since for the very first time the Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani was awarded with the Fields medal. I would like to move the spotlight on two Italian women who achieved great things in 2014. Samantha Cristoforetti Engineer, air force captain, but mostly astronaut! She is […]
What if getting cancer is mostly about bad luck?
Few days ago, Science published a groundbreaking research by Tomasetti and Vogelstein from Johns Hopkins University, hinting how getting cancer is significantly a matter of bad luck (*). The authors focus on stem cells and their divisions, and by applying some statistics, show that there is a strong correlation between such repeated process and the development of cancer. […]
Science to masses: why it doesn't work?
Here I am, back from the holidays and ready to go back to my publishing rhythm. This post come quite late with respect to the piece of news that inspired it. Long story short, last November the newly appointed President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Junker eliminated the role of (independent) Chief Scientific Adviser after […]
Women in Inverse Problems in Finland
An exciting "social outcome" of Inverse Days 2014 was the launch of a network of women in the Finnish Inverse Problems community. The Finnish Centre of Excellence in Inverse Problems committed long ago to the goal of gender equality and the percentage of women researchers in the group is higher than the average in the […]
Women network in Kumpula
Last Monday the first lunch meeting of women researchers in Kumpulan Kampus took place. The meeting was an attempt by Prof. Hanna Vehkamäki and myself to start a network of women researchers in Kumpulan Kampus. There is an existing association of women researchers in Helsinki called Helsingin tutkijanaiset ry (The Helsinki Association of Women Researchers) and […]
#16days: each of us can fight violence against women
We are now in the middle of a campaign called 16 days, lasting from Nov 25th to Dec 10th, to fight violence against women. Why on earth I write about it on a math and science blog? Well, various reasons. First of all, this blog is also about education, that is a extensive part of […]