This month we welcomed a new Administrative Assitant, Stephanie Desarmeau, who joined us from the Clinical Skills Learning Program at Schulich. Stephanie has taken over for Rob Read, who left the institute at the end of last month to pursue a full-time career in organic farming. Please join us in extending a warm welcome to Stephanie, and in wishing all the best to Rob on his exciting, new adventure. We are also pleased to announce another update to our Steering Committee — congratulations to Justin Donhauser who has been selected as the new postdoctoral fellow representative.

This month we hosted our first Rotman talk of the year. Dr. Alison Gopnik (University of California Berkeley) gave a talk titled “The Gardener and the Carpenter: What developmental science tells us about relations between parents and children.” on September 28 at Wolf Hall. She also delivered an on-campus talk, titled “When children are better learners than adults are: Theory formation, causal models, and the evolution of learning.” on September 29. Both talks were enthusiastically received, and videos of each are now available on our YouTube channel.

On September 6-9, the European Philosophy of Science Association held its 6th Biennial Conference (EPSA17) at the University of Exeter, UK. Four Rotman members attended and gave presentations. Their names and presentation titles are as follows:

    Klodian Coko: “The Structure and Epistemic Implications of Multiple Determination in Empirical Science”
    Marie Gueguen: “Implementing Indiscernibility in Quantum Mechanics”
    Adam Koberinski: “Theoretical physics in the 1950s: Particles, physicists, and field theories”
    Philippos Papagiannopoulos: “Incompatible models of computation over the reals and their importance for scientific computing”

Additional news and announcements from our members for the past month are listed below alphabetically.

Michael Cuffaro gave a talk titled “Information Causality, the Tsirelson Bound, and the ‘Being-Thus’ of Things” at the workshop held in memory of William Demopoulos, hosted by the Westen University Department of Philosophy on September 27. A pre-print of the paper is available on the Phil-Sci Archive.

On October 18, Michael Cuffaro will be giving a talk titled, “The Foundations of Computational Complexity in the Light of Quantum Computing,” for the Western University Applied Mathematics Colloquium.

On October 19, Chris Smeenk will be delivering a lecture titled “How is Scientific Cosmology Possible?” as part of the Philosophy of Physics O’Hara Lecture Series at the University of Washington.

Valérie Therrien gave a talk titled “The Axiom of Choice and the Road paved by Sierpiński” at the Hilbert in CEE Workshop at the 4th International Conference on the History and Philosophy of Computing (HaPoC) in Brno, Czech Republic on October 3.

Pictured above (clockwise): Alison Gopnik presents at Wolf Hall; interior view of the Exeter Cathedral (photo by Klodian Coko); new Rotman Administrative Assistant, Stephanie Desarmeau; Adam Koberinski presents at EPSA17 (photo by Marie Gueguen).