Preview Tao's talk.December 3, 2007
The Joint Mathematics Meetings have always featured talks by some of the top mathematical minds at work in the field. The 2008 gathering is no exception. The list of invited speakers encompasses a diverse group of accomplished mathematicians whose talks will cover a broad range of interesting and relevant topics.
University of California, Los Angeles professor Terence Tao will deliver one of the two Joint AMS-MAA Invited Addresses on Sunday, January 6 at 11:10 a.m. His presentation on Structure and Randomness in the Prime Numbers will describe the study of additive patterns contained within the prime numbers and highlight recent progress made in the field. A highly accomplished mathematician, Tao has received a number of important awards, including the Fields Medal in 2006. His blog provides updates on his research and various math-related topics.
Preview Tao's talk.
University of California, San Diego professor Fan Chung will deliver the other Joint AMS-MAA Invited Address on Tuesday, January 8 at 11:10 a.m. The Akamai Professor in Internet Mathematics at UC San Diego, Chung will speak about The Mathematics of PageRank, a program used by search engines to rank web pages. The complex mathematics underlying the PageRank algorithm involves a number of different areas, including spectral graph theory, random walks, probability, and approximation algorithms.
Preview Chung's talk.
American Institute of Mathematics Executive Director J. Brian Conrey will give the MAA Lecture for Students on Tuesday, January 8 at 1:00 p.m. His topic is The Riemann Hypothesis, arguably the most important unsolved problem in mathematics. Conrey's presentation will explain what the problem is and highlight some of the colorful history surrounding efforts to solve it. Conrey's specialty is number theory, with a particular emphasis on the nearly 150-year-old problem named after German mathematician Bernhard Riemann.
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University of Virginia professor Karen H. Parshall will deliver an MAA Invited Address on Monday, January 7 at 9:00 a.m. Her talk, titled 4000 Years of Algebra: An Historic Tour from BM 13901 to Moderne Algebra, will discuss the long and complicated story of how seemingly dissimilar mathematical topics are related via a 4000-year-long history that stretches from Mesopotamia to the publication of Bartel van der Waerden's classic text Moderne Algebra in 1930. Parshall's research interests lie in the history of science and mathematics, mostly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a special mathematical focus on the history of algebra.
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Additional Information about all the invited speakers can be found on the 2008 Joint Mathematics Meetings Wiki, or on the official meeting website.—R Miller