Public Lecture on Stylish Math at SIAM's Annual Meeting in July

July 8, 2008

Selected as the I.E. Block Community Lecturer, Dartmouth's Daniel N. Rockmore will discuss "Stylish Mathematics" at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in San Diego, on July 9.

Rockmore's lecture will highlight the use of mathematics to identify the creators of literary, visual, and dance works. The capability of authenticating artists' and authors' works via patterns and symmetries, as well as quantifying personal styles, will demonstrate just how "stylish" mathematics can be!

Rockmore's research interests include representation theory, fast Fourier transforms for groups, dynamical systems, and signal processing and data analysis. He has also done work on digital techniques for art authentication. He is the author of Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis: The Quest to Find the Hidden Law of Prime Numbers (Pantheon, 2005).

Rockmore's lecture, which is open to the public, is named in honor of I. Edward Block, founder of SIAM, who served as its Managing Director for nearly 20 years.

The same evening, SIAM will screen Mind in the Machine: The Discovery of Artificial Intelligence (2006), a 50-minute documentary by Rockmore, Wendy Conquest, and Bob Drake. The film recalls the earliest days of AI, when a group of mathematicians, meeting at Dartmouth College in the summer of 1956, initiated a field of study that now has applications in numerous scientific arenas. Interviews and original footage capture the excitement and spirit of the dawn of a new age.

The free lecture and film screening will take place on July 9 at 6:15 p.m. at the Town and Country Hotel & Resort in San Diego.

Source: SIAM, June 24, 2008.