Eventlist

Speaker: Prof Nikos Lygeros (from Greece)

Organisers: Coordinating Committee of Pontian Associations, the Greek Australian Cultural League of Melbourne and Victoria and the Greek Community of Melbourne

Synopsis

The systematic ethnic cleansing of the Christian Ottoman Greek population from its historic homeland in Anatolia during World War I and its aftermath (1914–23).

It was instigated by the government of the Ottoman Empire against the Greek population of the Empire and it included massacres, forced deportations involving death marches, summary expulsions, arbitrary execution, and the destruction of Christian Orthodox cultural, historical, and religious monuments.

According to various sources, several hundred thousand Ottoman Greeks died during this period. Most of the refugees and survivors fled to Greece (amounting to over a quarter of the prior population of Greece), some, especially those in Eastern provinces, took refuge in the neighbouring Russian Empire. Thus by the end of the 1919–22 Greco-Turkish War, most of the Greeks of Asia Minor had fled or been killed, those remaining were transferred to Greece under the terms of the later 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey, which formalized the exodus and barred the return of the refugees.

Other ethnic groups were similarly attacked by the Ottoman Empire during this period, including Assyrians and Armenians, and some scholars and organizations have recognized these events as part of the same genocidal policy.

Bio

Nikos Lygeros is a research fellow and computers and mathematics lecturer at France's University of Lyon, as well as a member of the French branch of Mensa and several other societies for individuals with high IQs (Sigma, Mega Foundation etc.).

The Stanford Binet is used in "Genetic Studies of Genius," the most famous longitudinal study of gifted individuals. Lygeros has also developed his own, more expansive, IQ test (the G-test) and created the PI society, where an individual's intelligence quotient is measured in the fields of mathematics, sciences, philosophy and literature. He is the editor of PI's online journal 'Perfection'.

Lygeros believes Achilles, Ulysses and Prometheus are archetypes of gifted, universal genius-"the universal genius is necessarily an altruist." A breakthrough by Lygeros and his colleagues in their research into number theory brought him into the international academic and media spotlight in 1998. A prolific essayist in mathematics, he also writes poetry, scripts, novels and essays on politics, philosophy, history, tragedy and drama.