Catching Up With Naftali Weinberger

Featured Former Fellow talks resume on January 25 when our speaker will be Naftali Weinberger (Postdoc 2018-19.) What’s he been up to since then? Find out.

Where are you now?  At the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy

What are you working on?  Right now I have two primary projects: One on causation in dynamical systems and another on causally modeling discrimination. I’m also involved in several collaborations with people I know primarily through my time at the Center

Favorite memory of The Center?   This is a hard one! One of the first things that jumped to mind though was the time Bill and Barbara Wimsatt had the fellows over for pizza. They lived in a high amenity apartment complex in Lawrenceville where everyone was either a 28-year-old hipster or a Wimsatt, and it seems like they were basically co-opted by the building’s other residents as honorary grandparents. For some reason I found it very amusing to eat pizza with the other fellows in the lobby while watching an endless parade of millenials and their dogs. 

What you you say is your greatest non-professional achievement since leaving the Center? Learning German. I even on occasion have gotten Germans to laugh (with me, I think). 

What’s the best book/movie/tv you’ve enjoyed lately? I really enjoyed Jordan Peele’s “Us”. I also think lots of Center members would enjoy Bill Bryson’s recent book on the history of the human body. Much of it will be familiar, but it has lots of great HPS anecdotes and is written with so much infectious enthusiasm that it’s a joy to read. 

Join us for Naftali’s talk, “Signal Manipulation & the Causal Analysis of Racial Discrimination” online only on Jan. 25.
Register here