Press release: Is intelligence linked to brain size?

12 September 2024

Gresham Professor of Geometry, Alain Goriely, to give his inaugural lecture on Tuesday, 17 September, online and in central London 

Back in the 1980s, a brand of saucepans was advertised by scientists with big brains, playing into the idea that size and intelligence were linked. But is it?  

A new lecture, The Big Brain: Size and Intelligence, from Gresham College in London will explore the latest research and try and offer an answer.  

It will be the first given by its new Professor of Geometry, Alain Goriely, and uniquely links mathematics with nature.  

He says that for centuries, scientists have been studying the human brain, trying to unpack its secrets.  

Is bigger better?  

Using scaling laws and simple ideas from statistics to study the brains of humans and animals and uncover basic principles that govern their sizes, Professor Goriely will test the hypothesis that links size to intelligence. 

“The brain has a very special place in our understanding of the world. We know that it's the organ that allows us to have feeling and thoughts, but also interact with others and the world around us,” Professor Goriely said.  

“At first sight, it seems that it's not quite related to the world of mathematics. That is the world of hard, objective truth, where everything about the brain seems to us subjective by nature. 

“What I will show in this lecture is that there is a close connection between mathematical ideas and the brain.  

“Essentially, as soon as new mathematical ideas were proposed, they were systematically applied to the study of the brain.  

“In turn, some of the questions that came from the study of the brain created new mathematical ideas.” 

The lecture will be given at Gresham College’s base in Barnard’s Inn Hall, Holborn, London on Tuesday, 17 September. 

Starting at 6pm, entry is free, and it is also broadcast live online. It will last an hour.  

In-person places can be booked online via Gresham College’s website.  

ENDS 

Notes to Editors  

Images available on request 

For more information about this story or to arrange an interview with a Gresham Professor please contact: Phil Creighton press@gresham.ac.uk  

About Gresham College  
Gresham College has been providing free, educational lectures - at the university level - since 1597 when Sir Thomas Gresham founded the college to bring Renaissance Learning to Londoners. Our history includes some of the luminaries of the scientific revolution including Robert Hooke and Sir Christopher Wren and connects us to the founding of the Royal Society.  

Today we carry on Sir Thomas's vision. The College aims to stimulate intellectual curiosity and to champion academic rigour, professional expertise and freedom of expression. www.gresham.ac.uk  

Gresham College is a registered charity number 1039962 and relies on donations to help us encourage people's love of learning for many years to come. For more details or to make a gift, visit our website.   

About the series Mathematics and the Brain: How Mathematics Changed the Way We Think about Ourselves 
The human brain is an organ of extreme complexity, the object of ultimate intellectual egocentrism and a source of endless mathematical challenges.  In this series, Professor Alain Goriely aims to show that great mathematical ideas were born from trying to understand the brain, and that by using geometry, scaling laws, modelling and network topology, we can uncover some of the basic principles at work in the shaping and working of our brains.