Lecture Summary: To better understand Earth's climate, we seek theories that predict observations regionally and globally, from human to geologic time scales. But what are the relevant observations? And how do we construct useful and realistic theories? We grapple with these questions by creating a mathematical observatory and focusing its telescopes on Arctic ice and climate. 

Biography: John Wettlaufer is Professor of Applicable Mathematics at Oxford and the A.M. Bateman Professor of Applied Mathematics, Geophysics and Physics at Yale. He is one of the world's leading authorities on the physics of ice and its role in climate. A Fellow of the American Physical Society and a Guggenheim Fellow, he has held visiting appointments at Cambridge University and the Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics in Stockholm.