by Ira Polans, Program Chair

The November meeting is on the 8th at 7:30PM in Peyton Hall on the Princeton University campus. The talk is on “From accreting black holes to merging galaxies: using computers to study astrophysics” by Dr. James Stone, the new Chair of Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University.

Dr. James Stone

The ever increasing performance of computer hardware and improvements to the accuracy of numerical algorithms are revolutionizing scientific research in many disciplines, but perhaps none more so than astronomy and astrophysics. This talk will begin with a description of why computation is crucial for the solution of a variety of problems at the forefront of research in astronomy. Most of the talk will describe how computers can be to solve important problems, from understanding stellar dynamics, to how black grow over cosmic time.

James Stone is the Lyman Spitzer, Jr. Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics and Chair of the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University, with a joint appointment in the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics (PACM). He received a PhD in astronomy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1990 and was a postdoctoral research associate at UIUC for two years before joining the faculty at the University of Maryland in 1992. In 2002 he was elected to the Professorship of Mathematical Physics (1978) at Cambridge University, and moved to Princeton in 2003.

Please note there will not be a meet-the-speaker dinner in November.

We hope you join us for what will be an informative and interesting talk! You are encouraged to invite interested friends and family to the talk.