Speaker Series
Measuring the Shape and Age of the Universe
Date+Time
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The MƒA Thursday Think Speaker Series brings accomplished speakers who dive into cutting-edge topics in STEM education to MƒA. These talks, held once a month throughout the school year, invite MƒA teachers and the general public to learn and engage with these thought leaders and professionals in mathematics, science, and education.
Observations of the microwave background, the leftover heat from the Big Bang, are a powerful probe of the structure of the universe. These observations address some of our fundamental questions about our universe: What is its age? What is its destiny? What is its composition? Is it finite or infinite? And how did it begin? In this talk, Dr. David Spergel explores these questions to highlight the known and still unknown aspects of the universe.
Dr. David N. Spergel is the President of the Simons Foundation. He is the Charles Young Professor of Astronomy Emeritus at Princeton University and was the Founding Director of the Center of Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in New York. Spergel received his undergraduate degree from Princeton in 1982. After a year of study at Oxford University, he received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1985. After two years as a long-term member at the Institute for Advanced Study, he joined the Princeton astrophysics faculty in 1987, where he was also Associate Faculty in the Departments of Physics and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. He served as Department Chair from 2006 to 2016. During his term as chair, the department was consistently ranked as #1 by US News and World Report and by the NAS. In 2016, he became the founding Director of the Center for Computational Astrophysics. In 2021, he assumed leadership of the Simons Foundation. Spergel is the author of more than 400 papers with over 115,000 citations and an h-index of 127.