Beauty and colors
- Home
- Événements
- Beauty and colors
For its third conference, the Research Chair on Beauty studies is hosted at the Paris Observatory.
Colours are part of nature's aesthetic arsenal. In biology, animals and plants compete with each other in amazing mechanisms to manipulate light and radiate majestic colours. What colours appear in stargazing ? How do the range of colours, their symbolic value and the notion of beauty relate to each other ?
Speakers
Mohammad Heydari-Malayeri
Dr. Mohammad Heydari-Malayeri is an astronomer, professor emeritus, at Paris Observatory.
His main field of research is the formation and evolution of massive stars : hot and luminous stars, which have masses over ten times that of our Sun.His research has included obtaining observational data using the Hubble Space Telescope.
He is the author of a dictionary, or rather a multidisciplinary astronomy-astrophysics encyclopedia, entitled The International Astronomical Union Dictionary of Astronomical Concepts, an open-access work on the web.
Apart from astronomy, Mohammad is interested in linguistics and etymology, particularly scientific terminology. He has contributed to a Persian scientific terminology system which, like Greek and Latin, is an Indo-European language. His method uses Persian roots, prefixes and affixes to develop a new technical vocabulary.
Michel Pastoureau
Michel Pastoureau is a historian, palaeographer archivist and Director of Studies at the EPHE - PSL. A specialist in colours, bestiaries, imagery and medieval and modern symbolism, Mr Pastoureau began in 2000 a series of works dedicated to the history of colours in Europe, from Antiquity to the present day.
Published last year by Éditions du Seuil, Jaune. Histoire d'une couleur, is the fifth ou-vrage in this series. M. Pastoureau offers a social and cultural history of the colour yellow, giving space to the practices of daily life, semantics, clothing, art history, history of science, beliefs and symbols that revolve around this colour.
Silvia Vignolini
Dr. Silvia Vignolini studied Physics at the University of Florence, Italy. Dr. Vignolini is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge in Chemistry and Bio-inspired materials.
Her research interest lies at the interface of chemistry, soft-matter physics, optics, and biology. In particular, her research focuses on the study of how natural materials (like cellulose) are assembled into complex architectures within living organisms and how the such materials can be exploited to fabricate a novel class of photonic pigments.
BBC News | Making beautiful colors without toxic chemicals
The registration for the conference is free but mandatory.
The Observatoire de Paris is a member of Université PSL.
Tickets are limited, please don't delay in registering.