October 29, 2021

Colloquium Topic: Science and Cooking -- Teaching Physics to Undergraduates (and the World!) Through Cooking

Over the past decade, we have developed a class teaching science to non-science majors at Harvard through cooking. The class combines the science of soft matter physics with recipes and appearances from the best chefs in the world, whose creations are used to inspire scientific questions.  The class has been taught at this point to thousands of in person students at Harvard, and more than 500K students through HarvardX. This past fall we published a popular book about the class through WH Norton.  In this lecture, I'll explain the story of the class, its history and its goals. Through a few simple examples (packing spheres and random walks) I'll explain how we have combined study of basic physics with high end cooking.

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Colloquium Speaker: Michael Brenner

Michael Brenner is the Michael F. Cronin professor of Applied Mathematics and Applied Physics, and Professor of Physics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He developed the popular Harvard class, "Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter," with his colleague David Weitz and chef Ferran Adrià. His research uses mathematics to examine a wide variety of problems in science and engineering, ranging from understanding the shapes of bird beaks, whale flippers and fungal spores, to finding the principles for designing materials that can assemble themselves, to answering ordinary questions about daily life, such as why a droplet of fluid splashes when it collides with a solid surface. His current research interests focus on the uses of machine learning for science.