About Lee Kong Chian Professorship
The Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS)’s Lee Kong Chian Endowment Fund was set up with a pledge commitment by the Lee Foundation, Singapore to support the Nobel Laureates program of IAS. The Lee Foundation is a charitable foundation in Singapore which funds programmes that promote education and other philanthropic work. Its founder, Lee Kong Chian was a prominent businessman and philanthropist.
The Lee Kong Chian Endowment Fund is used to support the work and outreach of Nobel Laureates so as to inspire and raise the insights of our students, faculty and Singapore, at Nobel Laureates level. The Nobel Laureates and other distinguished visitors of similar standing who visited IAS are appointed as “Lee Kong Chian Distinguished Professors”.
Conference on “Particle Physics, Astrophysics and Quantum Field Theory: 75 Years since Solvay” (27 to 29 November 2008)
To have not only one but two Physics Nobel Laureates convened at the same conference is truly a rare opportunity, if a statistician could derive a probability formula.
The IAS did just that having invited Professor Martin Perl and Professor Gerard ’t Hooft – both distinguished contributors to particle physics – as Lee Kong Chian Distinguished Professors to the three-day high energy physics conference.
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Professor Martin Perl presented his plenary lecture that opened the question of whether it is possible to directly detect dark energy through the presence of dark energy density. He also gave another talk titled “Lessons in Teaching Physics From My Life in Teaching” at the Physics Education Workshop held in conjunction with the conference. Prof Perl – a professor with Stanford University and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) – was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 for his work in the discovery of tau lepton. |
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Professor Gerard ’t Hooft’s plenary lecture was a discussion about crystalline gravity – the space-time interaction of matter with gravity and another talk titled “Education in the Netherlands and the Nobel Prizes” at the Physics Education Workshop. Prof ’t Hooft shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics with Martinus Veltman "for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics". Prof ’t Hooft is currently professor of theoretical physics at the Spinoza Institute of Utrecht University. |
SPMS Conference 2009 (20 to 22 July 2009)
The SPMS Conference 2009 was jointly organized by IAS and the School of Physical & Mathematical Sciences from 20 to 22 July 2009. The three-day conference featured the following five Lee Kong Chian Distinguished Professors who shared their latest findings with the participants:
Professor Richard Ernst presented three public lectures titled "Academic responsibility and our future", "Fascinating insights in Chemistry, Biology and Medicine by nuclear Magnetic Resonance and Magnetic Resonance Imaging" as well as "Arts and sciences - A personal perspective of Tibetan painting". He shared with the participants perspectives like the relations between arts and sciences, how to become a successful scientist and scientist's responsibilities. Prof Ernst – Honorary Doctor of the Technical University of Munich and University of Zurich, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1991 for his contributions towards the development of the methodology of high resolution Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy.
Professor Rudolph Marcus’s lecture was titled “From ‘On Water’ and Enzyme Catalysis to Single Molecules and Quantum Dots, Theory and Experiment”. Marcus theory, named after him, provides a thermodynamic and kinetic framework for describing one electron outer-sphere electron transfer and reveals information on such common phenomenon as photosynthesis and corrosion. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his contributions to the theory of electron transfer reactions in chemical system. He is an active professor at Caltech and a member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science.
Professor Anthony Leggett gave a lecture on "Some thoughts on the prospects for topological quantum computation" which enthused many students and lecturers. He 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. He was knighted (Knight Commander) by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004 "for services to physics”.
Professor Jean-Pierre Serre delivered a lecture on “Modular forms: old questions and recent results”. He is a French mathematician in the fields of algebraic geometry, number theory and topology. Prof Serre, at twenty-seven in 1954, is the youngest ever to be awarded the Fields Medal. He was also the first recipient of the Abel Prize in 2003.
Professor Pierre-Louis Lions’s lecture was titled "On Mean Field Games". The participants were presented with Mean Field Games, a new class of mathematical models and problems introduced and studied in collaboration with Jean-Michel Lasry. The lecture infused a lot of thought to the current research model of Partial Differential Equations at NTU. Prof Lions studies the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations, and received the Fields Medal for his mathematical work in 1994. He was the first to give a complete solution to the Boltzmann equation with proof.