Join us for a livestream program featuring Jim Stein ’62 to discuss his book The Fate of Schrodinger's Cat: Using Math and Computers to Explore the Counterintuitive and the surprising results that can come from mathematics. In his research, Stein explores fascinating and controversial questions involving prediction, decision-making, and statistical analysis in a number of diverse areas, ranging from whether there is such a thing as a “hot hand” in shooting a basketball, to how we can successfully predict, more than half the time, the decay of the radioactive atom.
Stein taught for 40 years as a professor of mathematics at California State University in Long Beach, California. He has written 10 or so books and 42 research papers in math and science. His books focus on what mathematics has been able to tell us about the Universe we live in, and how that knowledge can be used to improve our lives. His background includes working on projects related to the moon landing in the 1960s and as a stock options trader during the 1980s. He is semi-retired and currently teaching at El Camino Community College.
Moderating the program is Elissa Levy ’09, president of the Yale Science and Engineering Association. Having previously worked in the hedge fund industry, she now teaches high school physics in East Harlem, New York.
