Highlighted Speakers
Many exciting talks are scheduled for this meeting. The most updated list of them and their speakers can be found on the program page. Details on a few are listed below—indicative of what you can look forward to at this meeting.
Daniel A. Spielman to Speak on Graphs, Vectors, and Matrices
Daniel A. Spielman, Yale University, will give the AMS Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecture on Saturday, January 10, 2015, 8:30 p.m. - 9:30 p.m., Lila Cockrell Theatre, Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center. The title of his talk will be Graphs, Vectors, and Matrices.
Daniel Alan Spielman received his B.A. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Yale in 1992, and his Ph.D in Applied Mathematics from M.I.T. in 1995. He spent a year as a NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoc in the Computer Science Department at U.C. Berkeley, and then taught in the Applied Mathematics Department at M.I.T. until 2005. Since 2006, he has been a Professor at Yale University. He is presently the Henry Ford II Professor of Computer Science, Mathematics, and Applied Mathematics.
He has received many awards, including the 1995 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, the 2002 IEEE Information Theory Paper Award, the 2008 Godel Prize, the 2009 Fulkerson Prize, the 2010 Nevanlinna Prize, the 2014 Polya Prize, an inaugural Simons Investigator Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and a member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering. His main research interests include the design and analysis of algorithms, network science, machine learning, digital communications and scientific computing.
Ken Ono to Speak on Golden Numbers and Identities: The Legacy of Rogers and Ramanujan
Ken Ono, Emory University, will give an MAA Invited Address on Sunday, January 11, 2015, 9:00 a.m. - 9:50 a.m., Lila Cockrell Theatre, Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center. The title of his talk will be Golden Numbers and Identities: The Legacy of Rogers and Ramanujan.
Listen as Mike Breen, AMS Public Awareness Officer, speaks with Ken Ono about his upcoming lecture.
Ken Ono received his Ph.D from UCLA in 1993. Upon graduation, he held positions at the University of Georgia, the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), the Institute of Advanced Studies, and Penn State University, where he was named the Louis P. Martarano Professor in 1999. He was the Manasse Professor of Letters and Science and the Hilldale Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison before assuming his current position as the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Mathematics at Emory University in 2010.
He has authored over 150 research papers, as well as two books. His work includes ground-breaking results on partition congruences, coefficients of modular forms, traces of singular moduli, Borcherds products, mock-theta functions, and much more. He has advised 22 PhD students, and is on the editorial boards of 14 journals. He has received numerous awards and honors, including a Sloan Fellowship, a Presidential Early Career Award, a Packard Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. In addition to his research accomplishments, Ono is also a master lecturer and teacher as evidenced by his receipt of the 2005 National Science Foundation Director's Distinguished Teaching Scholar Award.
Donald G. Saari to Speak on From Voting Paradoxes to the Search for "Dark Matter"
Donald G. Saari, University of California, Irvine, will give the MAA-AMS-SIAM Gerald and Judith Porter Public Lecture on Saturday January 10, 2015, 3:30 p.m.-4:30 p.m., Lila Cockrell Theatre, Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center. The title of his talk will be From Voting Paradoxes to the Search for "Dark Matter".
Listen as Katharine Merow, Staff Writer at MAA, speaks with Donald Saari about his talk.
Don Saari grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, near the shores of Lake Superior, which ensured a youth full of skiing and camping. After his undergraduate degree from Michigan Tech, and his PhD in math from Purdue, he had a postdoctoral position in the Yale Astronomy Department. He then moved to the Northwestern University, where served one term as departmental chair and was the Pancoe Professor of Mathematics. Following the principle of changing universities every millennium, in 2000 he moved to the University of California in Irvine where he is the director of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a foreign member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters.
Michael Hopkins to Give the AMS Colloquium Lectures
Michael Hopkins, Harvard University, will give the AMS Colloquium Lectures on the following days:
- Saturday, January 10, 2015, 1:00 p.m.-2:00 p.m., Lila Cockrell Theatre, Convention Center, AMS Colloquium Lectures, Lecture I on Algebraic Topology: New and Old Directions
- Sunday, January 11, 2015, 1:00 p.m.-1:50 p.m., Room 217A, Convention Center, AMS Colloquium Lectures, Lecture II on The Kervaire Invariant Problem
- Monday, January 12, 2015, 1:00 p.m.-1:50 p.m., Room 217A, Convention Center, AMS Colloquium Lectures, Lecture III on Chern-Weil Theory and Abstract Homotopy Theory
Michael J. Hopkins, is one of the world’s pre-eminent algebraic topologists and a professor of mathematics at Harvard University. His work has revolutionized the field of algebraic topology, a field of mathematics which studies topological or geometric structures using the methods of algebra. He has pioneered the application of homotopy theory to a range of areas in mathematics, collaborating with geometers, number theorists and mathematical physicists.
Working with Michael Hill and Douglas Ravenel, Hopkins recently solved the long-standing Kervaire invariant problem. While this question first arose in the 1940s, it has a long history at Northwestern, particularly in the work of Mark Mahowald.
Hopkins is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a foreign member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. He is the recipient of numerous honors, including the National Academy of Sciences Award in Mathematics (2012), the American Mathematical Society’s Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry (2001), and the Frederic Esser Nemmers Prize in Mathematics (2014). Before joining Harvard’s faculty in 2005, Hopkins held professorships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago. He received a bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. from Northwestern, both in mathematics. He was also a Rhodes Scholar and earned his D.Phil. (doctor of philosophy) in mathematics from the University of Oxford.
Christiane Rousseau to Speak on Divergent Series and Differential Equations: Past, Present, Future
Christiane Rousseau, Université de Montréal, will give an MAA Invited Address on Monday, January 12, 2015, 9:00 a.m. - 9:50 a.m., Lila Cockrell Theatre, Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center. The title of her talk will be Divergent Series and Differential Equations: Past, Present, Future ….
Christiane Rousseau studied at Université de Montréal where she got her PhD in 1977. After postdoctoral studies at McGill University, she came back to Université de Montréal where she became professor. She chaired her department in 1993-97 and she has been President of the Canadian Mathematical Society from 2002 to 2004. When she was Director of Centre de Recherches Mathématiques (CRM) in 2008-09, she initiated the international year “Mathematics of Planet Earth 2013”. Since 2011, she is Vice-president of the International Mathematical Union. Her research area is dynamical systems. During her whole career, she led in parallel research activities and outreach activities: lectures in the schools, organization of mathematical camps, and articles in mathematical magazines. She is a recipient of the 2014 George Polya Award of the MAA.
Richard A. Tapia to Speak on the Remarkable Journey of the Isoperimetric Problem: From Euler to Steiner to Weierstrass
Richard A. Tapia, Rice University, will give an AMS-MAA Invited Address on Monday, January 12, 2015, 11:10 a.m. - 12:00 p.m., Lila Cockrell Theatre, Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center. The title of his talk will be The Remarkable Journey of the Isoperimetric Problem: From Euler to Steiner to Weierstrass.
Listen as Mike Breen, AMS Public Awareness Officer, speaks with Richard Tapia about his upcoming lecture.
Dr. Tapia was born to parents who emigrated from Mexico as young children in search of education. He is internationally known for his research in the computational and mathematical sciences and is a national leader in education and outreach. His current Rice positions are University Professor (only the sixth individual afforded this title in the 100 year history of Rice University), Maxfield Oshman Professor in the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics , and Director of the Center for Excellence and Equity in Education.
Among his many honors, Richard Tapia was a 2010 awardee of the National Medal of Science, the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on scientists and engineers, he was the first Hispanic elected to the National Academy of Engineering. In 1996 President Clinton appointed him to the National Science Board. From 2001 to 2004 he chaired the National Research Council's Board on Higher Education and the Workforce. He has received the National Science Foundation's inaugural Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring; and the Lifetime Mentor Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was also named one of 20 most influential leaders in minority math education by the National Research Council. This year Hispanic Business Magazine named Tapia one of the 100 most influential Latinos in the country. Two professional conferences have been named in his honor, recognizing his contributions to diversity: Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing conference and the Blackwell-Tapia Conference, whose founders described Tapia as a seminal figure who inspired a generation of African-American, Native American and Latino/Latina students to pursue careers in mathematics. Professor Tapia is recognized as a national leader in diversity and has provided leadership at a national level.
Jordan Ellenberg to Speak on Combinatorial Designs, Finite Geometries, and Beating the Lottery
Jordan Ellenberg, University of Wisconsin-Madison, will give an AMS-MAA Invited Address on Saturday January 10, 2015, 11:10 a.m.-12:00 p.m., Lila Cockrell Theatre, Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center. The title of his talk will be Combinatorial Designs, Finite Geometries, and Beating the Lottery.
Listen as Katharine Merow, Staff Writer at MAA, speaks with Jordan Ellenberg about his talk.
Jordan Ellenberg is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, specializing in number theory and arithmetic geometry. He received his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1998, under the direction of Barry Mazur, and was a postdoc at Princeton before joining the math department at Wisconsin in 2005. He has held an NSF CAREER grant and a Sloan fellowship, and is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Most recently, his work has centered on the development of geometric and topological approaches to conjectures in algebraic and analytic number theory.
He is also a popularizer of mathematics, writing articles on mathematical topics for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Slate, the Washington Post, and Wired, among other journals. His book "How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking” came out in 2014 and was a New York Times best seller. He lives with his wife and two children in Madison, WI.