Public Lectures

2017 Nobel Laureate.
RAINER WEISS (NAS) is a Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Previously Dr. Weiss served as an assistant physics professor at Tufts University and has been an adjunct professor at Louisiana State University since 2001. Dr. Weiss is known for his pioneering measurements of the spectrum of the cosmic microwave background radiation, his inventions of the monolithic silicon bolometer and the laser interferometer gravitational wave detector, and his roles as a co-founder and an intellectual leader of both the COBE (microwave background) Project and the LIGO (gravitational-wave detection) Project. He has received numerous scientific and group achievement awards from NASA, an MIT excellence in teaching award, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the National Space Club Science Award, the Médaille de l’ADION Observatoire de Nice, the Gruber Cosmology Prize, and the Einstein Prize of the American Physical Society. Dr. Weiss is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, The American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and he is a member of the American Astronomical Society, the New York Academy of Sciences, and Sigma Xi. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. in physics from MIT. Dr. Weiss is a member of the NAS and has served on nine NRC committees from 1986 to 2007 including the Committee on NASA Astrophysics Performance Assessment; the Panel on Particle, Nuclear, and Gravitational-wave Astrophysics; and the Task Group on Space Astronomy and Astrophysics.

ELLIOTT LIEB is an eminent American mathematical physicist and professor of mathematics and physics at Princeton University, who specializes in statistical mechanics, condensed matter theory, and functional analysis. In particular, his scientific works pertain to: the quantum and classical many-body problem, the stability of matter, atomic structure, the theory of magnetism, and the Hubbard model. He is a prolific author in mathematics and physics with over 300 publications. He received his B.S. in physics from MIT (1953) and his Ph.D. in mathematical physics from the University of Birmingham in England (1956). Lieb was a (1956–1957) Fulbright Fellow at Kyoto University, Japan, and for some time worked as the Staff Theoretical Physicist for IBM. He has been a professor at Princeton since 1975, following a leave from his professorship at MIT. Lieb has been awarded several prizes in mathematics and physics, including the 1978 Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics of the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics (1978), the Max Planck Medal of the German Physical Society (1992), the Boltzmann medal of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (1998), the Schock Prize (2001), and the Henri Poincaré Prize of the International Association of Mathematical Physics (2003). He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and has twice served (1982–1984 and 1997–1999) as the President of the International Association of Mathematical Physics. His Erdős number is 2. He is married to fellow Princeton professor Christiane Fellbaum.