Harry Kesten, Ph.D. ’58, the Goldwin Smith Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, whose insights advanced the modern understanding of probability theory and its applications, died March 29 in Ithaca. He was 87.
Award-winning poet and writer Claudia Rankine will read from her work for the Robert Chasen Memorial Poetry Reading on April 18 at 5 p.m. in the Alice Statler Auditorium, Statler Hall. The event will have free admission with ticket and is open to the public. Tickets are available at Willard Straight Hall Resource Center (4th/main floor) now and while supplies last. On April 18, doors will open at 4:30 p.m. for seating and books by the author will be available for purchase courtesy of Buffalo Street Books. This reading, which will conclude the Spring 2019 Barbara & David Zalaznick Reading Series, is sponsored by the Creative Writing Program of Cornell’s English Department.
Considered the birthplace of Off-Off-Broadway—theatre that is more experimental and less commercial than mainstream staged productions—the Caffe Cino was a haven for budding playwrights and performers, as well as for the queer community, in New York’s Greenwich Village from 1958–1968. From April 18–20, 2019, “An Evening at the Caffe Cino” pays homage to the historic venue in the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts’ Black Box Theatre.
The Environment & Sustainability Program, home of the new cross-college undergraduate major in Environmental & Sustainability Sciences (ESS), is hosting a spring gathering of humanities faculty and current and prospective majors April 10 in Room 401 of the Physical Sciences Building from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m.
Elizabeth Latham ’20 – calling for kindness throughout the world with her oration, “Feed and You Will Be Fed” – won the ninth annual Harold I. Saperstein ’31 Cornell Student Topical Sermon Contest.
The Democratic Party began in the 1820s as an organization of and for white men who opposed a strong federal government. The party gradually wooed a more inclusive constituency, and its partisans built a national state that sought to advance the common welfare.
On April 19, 1969, dozens of members of Cornell’s Afro-American Society and several Latino students occupied Willard Straight Hall for 36 hours to call attention to what they perceived as the university’s hostility toward students of color, its student judicial system and its slow progress in establishing an Africana studies program.
Despite its name, Cornell University’s Centrally Isolated Film Festival isn’t so isolated anymore. Now in its sixth year, the annual celebration of cinema, hosted by the Department of Performing and Media Arts, continues to expand, with submissions from distant states such as California, Illinois, and Rhode Island.
The quantum laws governing atoms and other tiny objects seem to defy common sense, and information encoded in quantum systems has weird, baffling properties like “quantum entanglement.”Physicist John Preskill will explain quantum entanglement, and why it makes quantum information fundamentally different from information in the macroscopic world, in the spring Hans Bethe Lecture, April 10 at 7:30 p.m. in Schwartz Auditorium, Rockefeller Hall.
Cornell Cinema welcomes back the electronic/ambient musical group Coupler to perform their new score for Yasujiro Ozu’s "Dragnet Girl "(1933) on April 10 at 7:30 p.m. in Willard Straight Theatre. The screening will be introduced by Andrew Campana, who will be joining the Department of Asian Studies in the College of Arts & Sciences in the Fall to teach courses on Japanese cinema and popular culture.
Over the course of two decades, Riché Richardson, associate professor of African-American literature in Cornell’s Africana Studies and Research Center, received her doctorate and two fellowships, taught at two universities, published numerous essays and a book – and survived three major surgeries.
Daniel Gaibel, information technology manager for the Language Resource Center (LRC) for 18 years, died March 30 of metastatic melanoma. He was 45.“His love for people, cultures, technology, and music was evident in everything he did. We will miss him dearly,” said Angelika Kraemer, LRC director. She noted that according to Gaibel, "fortune favors the bold" and the glass was always full.
"Solving the mysteries of animal behavior often involves immersing ourselves in their perceptual world. If they’re birds, it means taking a literal bird’s eye view of their behaviors."
Barry Strauss, the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies, writes in this Wall Street Journal essay, about the penchant for presidential hopefuls to pen the stories of their lives during election seasons.
The Berger Summer Internship Fund is again available to support undergraduate students in the College of Arts & Sciences pursuing unpaid or minimally paid summer internships.
There’s a good chance someone somewhere on March 21 wished you a happy first day of spring. For mathematician Steven Strogatz, the day possessed an added significance worth celebrating.“Happy max derivative day, everybody!” he wrote that evening to his more than 53,000 followers on Twitter.
The Cornell China Center has announced eight China Innovation Awards to interdisciplinary teams of Cornell faculty.The winning projects were selected from among 34 proposals submitted by faculty leaders across 47 departments, centers and programs in Cornell’s colleges and schools.
A team of astronomers has created a catalog with the 1,822 stars that can be observed by NASA’s new Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), most likely to host Earth-like planets.
This is an episode from the “What Makes Us Human?” podcast's fourth season, "What Does Water Mean for Us Humans?" from Cornell University’s College of Arts & Sciences, showcasing the newest thinking from across the disciplines about the relationship between humans and love. Featuring audio essays written and recorded by Cornell faculty, the series releases a new episode each Tuesday through the spring semester.
While students in some fields easily find paid summer positions, others interested in non-profits, health care, government or other areas often need to take internships or summer positions that provide valuable summer career experiences but don't offer much in terms of a paycheck.
A new episode of the “What Makes Us Human” podcast series featuring Comparative Literature professor William J. Kennedy explains the influence of water on European Renaissance culture.
From visiting the Galapagos Islands to being immersed in the study of evolutionary biology to traveling to work in a lab in Kenya, Kelsie Lopez ‘21, a biological sciences major from Lindenhurst, New York has been busy during her first two years at Cornell.
The research of Jun Liu, professor of molecular biology and genetics, is featured in this Cornell Research website story.Liu studies the bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) signaling pathway, which plays critical roles in multiple developmental and homeostatic processes. Malfunction of this pathway can cause various disorders, including cardiovascular diseases and cancer.
In this opinion piece in The Hill, Joe Margulies, professor of law and government, reacts to New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's global call to combat right-wing extremism."How do we answer this call? Thoughts and prayers are well and good, but what is the first step?" Margulies writes.
Chinese Communist Party officials often invoke the outrage of the Chinese people when disputing a foreign government’s actions or demands. International observers are often skeptical of these claims about the overarching feelings of 1.3 billion people.But not much is known about what citizens of the People’s Republic of China actually think about their country’s foreign policy. A Cornell scholar of Chinese politics and foreign relations is among the first to ask that question.
Samuel Barnett ’19 has been named one of 11 junior fellows by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.Barnett, a College Scholar whose studies focus on national security and geopolitics, will spend his fellowship year working with Carnegie’s executive office on issues of U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy.
*//*-->*/Image credit: Lela BrownAlthough climate change has become an increasingly prominent and important issue, finding ways to persuade people about the catastrophic dangers of further environmental degradation has proven to be challenging.
The new season of the “What Makes Us Human” podcast and essay series, titled “What Does Water Mean for Us Humans?” showcases the newest thinking by Cornell faculty across academic disciplines about the relationship between humans and water.
Ishion Hutchinson, associate professor of English Language and Literature, was honored March 13 as one of eight winners of the annual Donald Windham-Sandy M.Campbell Literature Prize. The award offers $165,000 prizes in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama. Hutchinson, along with poet Kwame Dawes, received the prize for outstanding work in poetry.
Students, staff and faculty members who exceeded their job responsibilities to enhance the atmosphere for women at Cornell were recognized at the 20th Cook Awards luncheon March 12 in Warren Hall. Colleagues, family and academic leaders including deans, vice provosts, President Martha E. Pollack and Provost Michael Kotlikoff attended the celebration.
This is an episode from the “What Makes Us Human?” podcast's fourth season, "What Does Water Mean for Us Humans?" from Cornell University’s College of Arts & Sciences, showcasing the newest thinking from across the disciplines about the relationship between humans and love. Featuring audio essays written and recorded by Cornell faculty, the series releases a new episode each Tuesday through the spring semester.
Associate Professor Ella Maria Diaz’s book, "Flying Under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force" (University of Texas Press, 2017), is the recipient of the 2019 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) book award.
The events of August 2017 brought worldwide attention to the issue of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar, who had long been persecuted and oppressed by the Burmese government and military. Despite the initial reaction to the violent displacement of over a million men, women, and children—as well as the deaths of thousands—global media outlets were slow to follow up on their first reports. With information about the genocide scarce and the call to action not nearly loud enough, it was cle
Steven Strogatz, the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics in the College of Arts & Sciences and author of "The Joy of X," explains the origin and meaning of pi in a New York Times op-ed.
Twelve graduate students will spend this year refining their dissertation plans and testing the waters of global research, with help from faculty mentors and intensive workshops, in the Einaudi-SSRC Dissertation Proposal Development Program.