Surya Ganguli

I am currently a fellow of the Sloan-Swartz Center for Theoretical Neurobiology in the Keck Center at UCSF. I am also supported by a career award from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Interfaces in Science Program.

During my time as a Sloan-Swartz fellow, I have enjoyed extended stays at several centers and institutions and, in addition to UCSF, I am especially grateful to:

Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience UC Berkeley

Laboratory for Mathematical Neuroscience Riken Brain Science Institute

Neurophysics Laboratory, ICNC Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit University College London

Center for Theoretical Neuroscience Columbia University

Center for Brain Science Harvard University

Before joining UCSF I did my PhD in string theory with Petr Horava in the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics and the Theory Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. And before this sojourn in the world of strings, I spent my time as an undergrad at MIT studying electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), mathematics and physics.

For more detailed information, please see my resume or this list of classes.

Although during my graduate work I played around with black holes, eleven dimensions, and little loops of string, I am now more fascinated by the world of biology which is full of incredible amounts of data but a relative paucity of theoretical frameworks within which to interpret and understand this data. The situation is quite the opposite in string theory where beautiful frameworks abound and data is sparse. My new interests span the gamut of theoretical questions in neuroscience and systems biology, and I am involved in several different projects which are in various stages of being written up. Please see my materials below for more information on these projects.

Recent Projects:

The Information Geometry of Survey Propagation. Abstract

Learning and memory in an exactly solvable stochastic spiking network. Abstract Slides

Memory Traces in Dynamical Systems Paper Supplemental

One dimensional dynamics of attention and decision making in area LIP. Paper Supplemental

Function Constrains Network Architecture and Dynamics: A Case Study on the Yeast Cell Cycle Boolean Network. Paper

Here are my string theory publications:

Boundary Scattering in 1+1 Dimensions as an Aharanov-Bohm Effect.

E10 Orbifolds.

Twisted Six Dimensional Gauge Theories on Tori, Matrix Models, and Integrable Systems.

Holographic Protection of Chronology in Universes of the Godel Type.

Here is the first chapter of my PhD thesis, which summarizes the above work, and gives an introduction to the very important holographic principle:

Geometry from Algebra: The Holographic Emergence of Spacetime in String Theory.

Here is my undergraduate thesis, done at the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT, with Professor Michel Baranger as my advisor:

Quantum Mechanics on Phase Space: Geometry and Motion of the Wigner Distribution.

Here are some papers written for physics and mathematics coursework at Berkeley:

Fibre Bundles and Gauge Theories in Classical Physics: A Unified Description of Falling Cats, Magnetic Monopoles and Berry's Phase.

Noncommutative Algebras from Geometric Quantization via Symplectic Groupoids.

A Survey of Toric Mirror Symmetry: The Monomial Divisor Mirror Map and Topological Phases in String Theory.

Introduction to Solitons and their Quantization.

The Entropy of Black holes in M-theory.

Here are some articles I wrote for the World of Physics encyclopedia as a consultant for the Gale Group.

Josephson Junctions

Nuclear Weapons

Pulsars

Quantum Complementarity

Sonar

Topology

And finally, here are some articles I wrote for the World of Computer Science encyclopedia:

Artificial Intelligence Automata Theory Biological Computing

Genetic Algorithms Grammar Theory and Chomsky Hierarchy Undecidability and the Halting Problem

Information Theory Neural Networks Perceptrons