Columbia University’s Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America will host two public lectures by prominent professors in the humanities. In recognition of the anniversaries of important moments in world history, the Academy is pleased to present a lecture on Galileo (to coincide with the 400th anniversary of his first astronomical observation through a telescope) and another on the Futurist writer F.T. Marinetti (in celebration of the centennial of the Italian Avant-Garde).
Joseph Patterson joined the faculty of the Department of Astronomy at Columbia University in 1983. He has worked as a Research Scientist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (1980-1983) and is a graduate of Harvard University, where he received his bachelors degree in the History of Science with Magna Cum Laude honors. Patterson earned his Ph.D in Astronomy at the University of Texas in 1979 and was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Michigan (1979-1980). At Columbia Patterson received a Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching in 1997 and in 2003 received the 250th Anniversary Distinguished Teaching Award. He has authored or co-authored a number of publications including Superhumps in Cataclysmic Binaries, The 2001 Superoutburst of of WZ Sagittae; and Accretion-Disk Precession and Substellar Secondaries in Cataclysmic Variables.
