Levi L. Conant Lecture Series

Levi Leonard Conant, 1857-1916, Longtime Faculty Member at WPI

Levi L. Conant was a mathematician and educator who spent most of his career as a faculty member at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He was head of the mathematics department from 1908 until his death, and served as interim president from 1911 to 1913.

Conant was noted as an outstanding teacher, and an active scholar. He published a number of articles in scientific journals and wrote four textbooks: The Number Concept: Its Origins and Development (1896), Original Exercises in Plane and Solid Geometry (1905), Five-Place Logarithmic and Trigonometric Tables (1909), and Plane and Spherical Trigonometry (1909).

Upon his premature death, in 1916, a large bequest was made to The American Mathematical Society, which established the Levi L. Conant Prize, awarded annually to recognize the best expository paper published in either Notices of the AMS or the Bulletin of the AMS during the previous five years.

Fuller Labs, Perreault Hall/upper

Thursday, September 24, 2009, 4:00 p.m.

Download the flyer (PDF)

View Avi Wigderson's talk (Windows Media Player required)

Expander graphs: —a playground for algebra, geometry, combinatorics, and computer science

Expander graphs are extremely useful objects. In computer science, their applications range from network design, computational, derandomization error correction, data organization, and more. In mathematics they are used in topology, group theory, game theory, information theory, and naturally, graph theory. I plan to explain what expanders and their basic properties are, and survey the quest to explicitly construct them. I'll focus on the recent combinatorial constructions, via the "zig-zag" product, and how these can go beyond the bounds achieved by algebraic methods. I'll also demonstrate some of the applications.

This talk is accessible to graduate students with no special background
in Math and Computer Science.

Avi Wigderson received his BSc in computer science from Technion in 1980, and his PhD from Princeton in 1983. He served on the faculty at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem from 1986 to 2003, and is currently a member of the mathematics faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. His research interests lie principally in complexity theory, algorithms, randomness, and cryptography. His honors include the Nevanlinna Prize for outstanding contributions in mathematical aspects of information sciences (1994), the ICM
Plenary Lecture in Madrid, Spain (2006), the AMS Conant Prize in 2008, and the Gödel Prize in 2009.

Higgins Labs, Room 116

Monday, March 30, 2009, 4:00 p.m.

Download the flyer (PDF)

View Brian Conrey's talk (Windows Media Player required)

The Riemann Hypothesis - A million dollar mystery

The famous Riemann Hypothesis is nearly 150 years old. It was on Hilbert's list of 23 problems in 1900 and now it is on the Clay list of Millennium Prize Problems, and has a one million dollar reward for its solution.

Many people regard it as the most important unsolved problem in all of mathematics. In this talk we will explain exactly what the Riemann Hypothesis is and give some of the colorful history that has grown up around efforts to solve it.

Brian Conrey is the founding Executive Director of the American Institute of Mathematics. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan, has served on the faculties of University of Illinois and Oklahoma State University, and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study. He serves as an editor of the Journal of Number Theory and is also active in several outreach programs for high school students interested in mathematics.

Olin Hall, Room 107

Monday, March 24, 2008, 3:00 p.m.

Download the flyer (PDF)

View Jeffrey Weeks talk (Windows Media Player required)

The Shape of Space

When we look out on a clear night, the universe seems infinite. Yet this infinity might be an illusion. During the first half of the presentation, computer games will introduce the concept of a "multiconnected universe."

Interactive 3D graphics will then take the viewer on a tour of several possible shapes for space. Finally, we'll see how recent satellite data provide tantalizing clues to the true shape of our universe.

The only prerequisites for this talk are curiosity and imagination. Middle school and high school students, people interested in astronomy, and all members of the WPI community are welcome to attend.

Jeffrey Weeks, an independent scholar residing in New York state, has received the 2007 AMS Levi L. Conant Prize for his article "The Poincaré Dodecahedral Space and the Mystery of the Missing Fluctuations," Notices of the AMS, June/July 2004.

In this article, together with an earlier one, "Measuring the Space of the Universe" (Notices, December 1998), co-authored with Neil Cornish, Weeks explains how extremely sensitive measurements of microwave radiation across the sky provide information about the origins and shape of the universe. Weeks discusses what kind of shape our universe could have. The three possibilities are a spherical universe, a Euclidean universe, or a universe that is a hyperbolic 3-manifold.

"Weeks has explained the mathematics behind models whose validity cosmologists debate while waiting for more experimental evidence... Weeks has given a rare glimpse into the role of mathematics in the development and testing of physical theories," the prize citation says.

In 1999 Weeks was awarded a MacArthur "genius" fellowship and now works as a freelance mathematician. He is well known for his geometry and topology software, as well as for his work in cosmology.

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Last modified: October 06, 2009 11:44:21