Siobhan Roberts: Embracing the Uncertainties

In her talk, Siobhan Roberts will reflect on her pandemic reporting and the importance of uncertainty in science. She will discuss epistemic uncertainty, a lack of knowledge about facts and numbers pertaining to the past and present, versus aleatory uncertainty, unknowns about the future due to randomness and chance. She will also explore the impact of Bayesian analysis on our own thinking, putting up the question: Should we think like a Bayesian?

About Siobhan Roberts

Siobhan Roberts has worked as a freelance journalist with a focus on mathematics and science since 2001. She writes regularly for The New York Times “Science Times,” and has contributed to The New Yorker’s science and tech blog “Elements,” The Walrus, Quanta and The Guardian, among other publications. Moreover, she is the author of two biographies of mathematicians: “King of Infinite Space” on Donald Coxeter, and “Genius at Play” on John Horton Conway. She earned multiple awards for her work, among them the Euler Book Prize from Mathematical Association of America. She is the ninth HITS “Journalist in Residence.”

REGISTRATION: