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The President’s Seminars<br />
The Seminars continue to be a vital and popular event in Wolfson’s busy calendar,<br />
and once again have showcased the many merits of its academic community. Their<br />
success is due to our speakers’ enthusiasm and their capacity to meet the challenges<br />
posed by our broad themes, always chosen to allow contributions from the widest<br />
range of faculties and departments: ‘Memory’, ‘Proof/s’, ‘Childhood’, ‘Law and<br />
Society’, ‘Dreams and Sleep’. The speakers’ willingness to participate is evidence<br />
of the continuing support of <strong>College</strong> members, regardless of their career stage, and<br />
have given us another series of captivating insights into the research undertaken<br />
within Wolfson.<br />
In the first of our seminars, Professor Jon Stallworthy (a very dear and respected<br />
member of the <strong>College</strong>) meditated on the function of ‘Memory’ in poetry, and<br />
eloquently and engagingly considered Memory as ‘the Mother of the Muses’.<br />
He was followed later in Michaelmas by Professor Bob Coecke, who spoke of his<br />
ground-breaking research in the Quantum Group which he co-heads – in particular<br />
his research into the application of categorical quantum mechanics to natural<br />
language processing in computational linguistics. In Hilary, we were delighted to<br />
welcome Dr Lucy Cluver and Dr Bettina Lange. Lucy spoke passionately about<br />
her work on reducing HIV risks for children in Sub-Saharan Africa. Bettina spoke<br />
illuminatingly about developing law and society perspectives for understanding<br />
environmental regulation, and argued convincingly that regulation was important.<br />
In our final seminar, in the midst of an especially busy Trinity Term, Professor<br />
Anke Ehlers described the experiences of children suffering from Post-traumatic<br />
Stress Disorder.<br />
Our research fellows and graduate students were no less interesting, illuminating<br />
or, indeed, entertaining. At the first seminar Dr David Owald gave a fascinating<br />
and eye-opening talk drawing on his research on Drosophila (in particular, his<br />
research into visualising cellural processes of memory), and Heather Munro spoke<br />
of the role of memory in Social Anthropology. Dr Graham Leigh, who works on<br />
formalized theories of truth and employs techniques drawn from mathematical logic<br />
and constructive mathematics to provide a formal analysis of various meta-theoretic<br />
concepts including truth, provability and knowledge, asked whether mathematics<br />
is about truth or proofs. On a different subject, the ever-entertaining Matthew<br />
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