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MAA Distinguished Lecture Series

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Funded by the National Security Agency
Carriage House Conference Center, Washington DC

The MAA, with the generous support of the NSA, is proud to present a series of public lectures. The series features some of the foremost experts within the field of mathematics, known for their ability to make current mathematical ideas accessible to non-specialists, and provides a fabulous and fun learning opportunity for both professionals and students, as well as anyone interested in learning more about current trends in mathematics and the relationship between mathematics and broader scientific, engineering and technological endeavors.

The following lectures are scheduled for the fall and winter:

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MAA Distinguished Lecture: Andrew GranvillePrimes are the building blocks from which the integers are made, and so it is of interest to understand how they are distributed. Questions abound:

How many primes are there?
How many primes are there up to a given point?
Is there a good formula that tells us what is a prime and what is not?
Is there a way to find out quickly whether a given integer is prime?
How many primes are there in certain patterns?
Do polynomials take on many prime values?
How about consecutive prime values?
How are primes spaced?

Versions of some of these questions are considered to be among the most difficult open problems in mathematics. On the other hand there has been spectacular recent progress on several of these questions. We will discuss all this and more in this lecture.
Andrew Granville is the Canadian Research Chair in number theory at the University of Montreal. He specializes in analytic number theory and especially properties of prime numbers. His recent research has centered around the (mathematical) notion of "pretentiousness". His awards include the Presidential Faculty Fellowship from President Clinton in 1994, and the Chauvenet Prize (from the MAA) in 2008, he gave the Erdos Memorial lecture of the American Mathematical Society, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2007.

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MAA Distinguished Lecture: Rebecca GoldinNews increasingly depends on a careful dissection of numbers. Statistics are everywhere, from how many people lack health insurance to how to improve math education. Yet for being so prevalent, statistics are badly understood by the general public.

Mark Twain popularized the quote that "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics." While this quote suggests the scary idea that statistics can be manipulated to say anything, I will argue that statistics can tell us lots of useful things when used appropriately, and that the more the media does this for us, the more educated we can be as news consumers, and the better we will be at truly evaluating risk for ourselves and others.

In this talk, I'll illustrate how the press can misuse and even abuse statistics using examples of news coverage. Since news sources are the main avenue by which the public understands many public health issues, these misguided representations of science can actually shape public policy, legislation, and individual choices. We will see why it is so important that media writers understand basic concepts from statistics, epidemiology and even toxicology. I will also show how powerful the work can be when the press goes beyond politics and morality to point out what science says, what it doesn't, and what it can't.

Rebecca Goldin is a professor of mathematics at George Mason University. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard, and her PhD from MIT. She taught at University of Maryland as a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow before joining George Mason in 2001. She currently serves as the Director of Research for Statistical Assessment Service (STATS), a nonprofit media education and watchdog group affiliated with George Mason. When she's not thinking about statistics in the media, she's pursuing her research interests in group actions on manifolds and symplectic geometry. Last year, Goldin won the Ruth I. Michler Memorial Prize for mathematics.

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MAA Distinguished Lecture: Ruth CharneyChildren build models with 3-dimensional cubes. Mathematicians build them with higher dimensional cubes. Many physical systems can be represented by geometric models based on cubes. Using an example from robotics, we will investigate how such models are constructed and what can we learn from their strange, but beautiful geometry.

Ruth Charney is Professor of Mathematics at Brandeis University. She received her undergraduate degree from Brandeis and her PhD from Princeton. She taught at Berkeley, Yale, and Ohio State University before returning to her alma mater in 2003. She currently serves as Chair of her department and as a Vice President of the American Mathematical Society. She was never sure whether she was a topologist or an algebraist, and is now happily immersed in geometric group theory, a combination of the two.

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MAA Distinguished Lecture: Martin GolubitskyRegular patterns appear all around us: from vast geological formations to the ripples in a vibrating coffee cup, from the gaits of trotting horses to tongues of flames, and even in visual hallucinations. The mathematical notion of symmetry is a key to understanding how and why these patterns form. In this lecture Professor Golubitsky will show some of these fascinating patterns and explain how mathematical symmetry enters the picture.

Martin Golubitsky is Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Physical Sciences at the Ohio State University, where, beginning in September, he will serve as Director of the Mathematical Biosciences Institute. He received his PhD in Mathematics from M.I.T. in 1970 and has been Professor of Mathematics at Arizona State University and Cullen Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at the University of Houston.

Dr. Golubitsky works in the fields of nonlinear dynamics and bifurcation theory studying the role of symmetry in the formation of patterns in physical systems and the role of network architecture in the dynamics of coupled systems. His recent research focuses on some mathematical aspects of biological applications: animal gaits, the visual cortex, the auditory system, and coupled systems. He has co-authored four graduate texts, one undergraduate text, two nontechnical trade books, (Fearful Symmetry: Is God a Geometer with Ian Stewart and Symmetry in Chaos with Michael Field) and over 100 research papers.

Dr. Golubitsky is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a past President of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

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MAA Distinguished Lecture: Keith DevlinAt four distinct stages in the development of modern society, mathematics (in particular, acquisition of the ability to carry out new kinds of computation) changed in a fundamental, dramatic, and revolutionary way how we humans understand the world and live our lives.

The fourth such change is taking place during our lifetime, brought about by the invention of machines that can be instructed to compute for us. The others occurred in 8,000 B.C., the 13th century, and the 17th century. I'll look at how human life and cognition changed at each of those three stages.

Read more about Keith Devlin's lecture


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