First lectures in the Seminar Series of this academic year will take place in September and October in the Roger Scruton Auditorium at Komenského náměstí and will focus on social sciences, law and mathematics and computer science. All will be held in English.
The first speaker on 25 September is Antti Gronow from the University of Helsinki, who will explore political polarisation on social media. Based on an analysis of 11.5 million tweets, he will reveal how interactions within and between groups on social media influence ideological differences. The lecture is entitled Political Polarization: A Network Perspective.
Professor Stefan Enchelmaier from Oxford will focus on the impact of EU law on the free movement of goods, including ground-breaking decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Union, from early decisions to the influential “Keck” case. The lecture Free Movement of Goods: Evolution and Intelligent Design in the Foundations of the European Union takes place on 3 October.
Tamar Ziegler, known for her work in ergodic theory, combinatorics and number theory, will introduce the Möbius function and its importance in number theory in her lecture entitled Sign Patterns of the Mobius Function. The professor from the Hebrew University will speak in Brno on 9 October.
A day later, on 10 October, Professor Virginijus Šikšnys from Vilnius University will visit Brno as part of the prestigious Mendel Lectures series. His lecture CRISPR-Cas: From Bacterial Immunity towards Genome Editing and Beyond in the Mendel Museum refectory will focus on the structural and molecular mechanisms of antiviral defence systems in bacteria and the development of new tools for genome editing.