L. C. Evans |
On March 29, 2000, Professor L. C. Evans of UC-Berkeley gave the
Fifth
Wolfgang Wasow Memorial Lecture on ``Effective Hamiltonians.'' In his lecture
Professor Evans explained some recent work with D. Gomes concerning PDE
methods for Hamiltonian dynamics. As he described it, the main point is
that
there exist weak solutions of a certain PDE and these solutions lead to a
sort of integrable structure for certain trajectories. Following the lecture
there was a reception in the 9th floor lounge of Van Vleck Hall.
Previous Wasow Lecturers have been Jürgen Moser, Joseph Keller, Louis
Nirenberg, and Cathleen Morawetz. The Sixth Memorial Lecture will be given by
Professor Emeritus Peter Lax of the Courant Institute of NYU in early fall
of 2001.
There will be two Distinguished Lecturers this spring: Terence Tao
of UCLA in April and C. Vafa of Harvard University in May.
Alan Edelman |
Professor Alan Edelman of MIT gave the Fifth Annual LAA Lecture on
March 22,
2000. The title of his lecture was ``Why are eigenvalues of random matrices
cool?'' In 1998 Professor Edelman (jointly with Eric Kostlan) was awarded the
MAA Chauvenet Prize for the paper: "How many zeros of a random polynomial are
real?" Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 32 (1995), 1-37. In
his
paper ``The Mathematics of the Pentium Flaw'' in the March 1997 issue of SIAM
Review, he gives a detailed description of what went wrong with the pentium
chip. A reception in the 9th floor lounge of Van Vleck Hall followed the
lecture.
Previous LAA Lectures have been Chandler Davis, Victor Klee, Ludwig Elsner,
and Gene Golub. The Sixth LAA Lecture will be given by Professor William
Fulton of the University of Michigan on April 27, 2001.
Persi Diaconis |
Professor Persi Diaconis of Stanford University was the Spring
2000 Distinguished Lecturer. He visited the Mathematics Department
during the week of April 3, 2000 and gave three lecturers. The
first lecture was in the Probability Seminar on ``Random Walks &
Hecke Algebras.'' The second lecture was aimed at graduate students
and undergraduates and was titled ``The Mathematics of Shuffling
Cards,'' and was given to a full house in B-239 Van Vleck. Both
students and faculty alike marveled not only at the beautiful
mathematics involved but also at Professor Diaconis's manual
dexterity with cards. The third lecture was part of our colloquium
series and was on ``Zeros of the Zeta Function and Eigenvalues of
Random Matrices.''