PIRSIQ

Project Speaker: Rupert Klein
Project Members: Cezar Ionescu, Nicola Botta, all PIK Members
Funding: PIK

PIK’s interdisciplinary research goals necessitate a conscious activity aiming at the development of common or at least overlapping, priorities and notions of quality. PIRSIQ has supported this development by initiating cross-disciplinary discussions and philosophical reflections on our research work.

Research at PIK involves a number of difficulties inherent in our objects of study, which are complex and inhomogeneous in terms of the disciplines concerned. Thus, they lead to the necessity of each department playing simultaneous roles as supporter and scientific leader of a project. These difficulties, while also being at the core of the former PIKuliar Culture ToPIK, today's Research Domain IV, are NOT at the core of the PIRSIQ project. In contrast, we focus on contingent complexity due to, among other things, different languages, metaphysical concepts, sets of priorities, and educational backgrounds. But this troublesome diversity is actually one of our most important assets and the very basis of the PIRSIQ project.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig demonstrated how the concept of Quality can be an essential one in the attempt to reconcile the seemingly orthogonal "romantic/artistic" and "scientific/technological" world views. It is reasonable to expect that this concept will also prove useful to our task of fostering interdisciplinary research work at PIK. Within this project we have initiated several activities in order to foster the PIK-internal scientific dialogue.

PIRSIQ Seminar

In the framework of this seminar we have invited external speakers as well as members of the institute to provide their views on topics related to PIRSIQ’s overall goals. Seminar titles ranged from "Object-oriented software design" (Bertrand Meyer, inventor of the Eiffel programming language), via "State of the art of climate model validation" (Andrey Ganopolski, developer of CLIMBER, the intermediate complexity climate model), "Remarks about model validation" (Nicola Botta, member of Data & Computation's Scientific Computing group), "Translating language and numbers to describe climate change risks" (Antony Patt, Boston University and PIK) to "Wittgenstein and the idea of an Empire" (Carlo Jaeger, head of Global Change and Social Systems at PIK).

Cartesian Seminar

Our research requires an in-depth exchange of ideas and information among scientists from various disciplines. Each discipline, however, generally increases the efficiency of internal discourse by developing its own abbreviations, and by relying on a presumed contextual background. As the specifics of these specializations are rarely spelled out explicitly, they often impede an efficient interdisciplinary dialogue. Within the Cartesian Seminar we counteract this difficulty by exercising our communication skills. We discuss short texts of general interest to PIK’s research at a very detailed level, the goal being a common, clear understanding of the text among the small group of participants. Among the texts studied were parts of Hilary Putnam’s The Many Faces of Realism, an introductory chapter from Self-similarity: Similarity and Intermediate Asymptotics by Grigary Isaakovich Barenblatt, "Notes on the Theory of Choice" by M. Krebs, and a note on Domains of Discourse by Carlo Jaeger.

Scientific Training

The project also organized lectures on applied mathematics. Among them were an introductory course on "Dynamical Systems" by Yuri Svirezhev, PIK, and a series on "Multi-valued Logics and Applications" by Paul Flondor "Politehnica" University of Bucharest, who has been a regular visitor at PIK as a PIRSIQ guest since 2003.