Playing with the paradox: surprises and disappointments
Speaker: Marta Macho Stadler (University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU)
Introduced by: David Martín de Diego (ICMAT)
Date: 14 December 2016, 19:30
Venue: Residencia de Estudiantes
Abstract: In our daily lives we often encounter absurd or paradoxical situations. We solve them with varying degrees of success, often guided by intuition. Surprisingly, such contradictions are also common in mathematics and science. In many cases, they are the driving forces that enable advances in many fields.
The paradox that gives its name to this lecture, delivered by Marta Macho-Stadler (UPV/EHU), was put forward by Bertrand Russell in 1901 and shows that the original set theory formulated by Cantor and Frege is contradictory.
This talk will present this and other paradoxes brought about by our ‘limited’ vision, of a geometric nature; by infinity, arising from the misuse of logic; of a semantic nature, caused by the vagueness of language; or by a poor definition of chance.
Marta Macho Stadler (Bilbao, 1962) has been a lecturer at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) since 1985. She holds a PhD in Mathematics from Claude Bernard University Lyon 1 (France) and specialises in the geometric theory of foliations and non-commutative geometry.
She received the igUAldad 2015 Award from the University of Alicante ‘for her actions in defence of equality between women and men and, in particular, for her teaching and outreach activities aimed at making the contributions of women scientists visible not only in academia, but also in social progress’. In October 2015 she was also awarded the Medal of the Royal Spanish Mathematical Society in its first edition ‘for her work in popularising mathematics, for her commitment to equality and for building bridges between mathematics teachers at different educational levels.’
She has been involved for years in various activities in cultural or educational centres. She collaborates in different blogs, such as ZTFNews.org (Faculty of Science and Technology, UPV/EHU) and Cuaderno de Cultura Científica (Chair of Scientific Culture, UPV/EHU), among others. She is the editor of the blog of the Chair of Scientific Culture of the UPV/EHU Mujeres con ciencia.