Fox and Hedgehog Seminar Series

The Fox and Hedgehog seminar aims to forge closer ties within our broad academic community: between mathematicians and physicists, and between junior and senior members. The seminars are a collaboration among the various partner institutions in the AGQ CDT: the schools/departments of mathematics at Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Heriot-Watt, and the Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics. The target audience of this series is PhD students, although any and all interested staff and students are always welcome to attend. It asks the question Are you a Fox or a Hedgehog? inspired by the characterisation by Isaiah Berlin.
In an article in the New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson writes, “Great scientists come in two varieties, which Isaiah Berlin, quoting the seventh-century-BC poet Archilochus, called foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes know many tricks, hedgehogs only one. Foxes are interested in everything, and move easily from one problem to another. Hedgehogs are interested only in a few problems which they consider fundamental, and stick with the same problems for years or decades… Science needs both hedgehogs and foxes for its healthy growth, hedgehogs to dig deep into the nature of things, foxes to explore the complicated details of our marvelous universe.”