Clay Public Lectures
The Music of the Primes
Marcus du Sautoy, Oxford University
Thursday, May 8, 2008 at 6:00 pm
MIT, Compton Laboratories (Building 26)
Room 26-100
Access via 60 Vassar Street
Cambridge, MA
Marcus du Sautoy, author of the The Music of the Primes, will discuss the mystery of prime numbers, the history behind the Riemann hypothesis and the ongoing quest to solve it.
Why did Beckham choose the number 23 shirt? How is 17 the key to the evolutionary survival of a strange species of cicada? Prime numbers are the atoms of arithmetic -- the hydrogen and oxygen of the world of numbers. Despite their fundamental importance to mathematics, they represent one of the most tantalizing enigmas in the pursuit of human knowledge. In 1859, the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann put forward an idea -- a hypothesis -- that seemed to reveal a magical harmony at work in the numerical landscape. A million dollars now await the person who can unravel the mystery of the hidden music that might explain the cacophony of the primes. More
Technology-driven Statistics
Terry Speed, UC Berkeley, and WEHI in Melbourne, Australia
Tuesday, October 30, 2007 at 7:00 pm
Harvard University Sceince Center -- Hall B
One Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA
Forty years ago, biologists collected data in their notebooks. If they needed help from a statistician in analyzing and interpreting it, they would pass over a piece of paper with numbers on it. The theory on which statistical analyses was built a couple of decades earlier seemed entirely adequate for the task. more....
Surfing with wavelets
Ingrid Daubechies,
Princeton Univeristy
Tuesday, April 10, 2007 at 7:00 PM
MIT Stata Center
Cambridge, MA, 02138
In this talk, Princeton mathematics professor Ingrid Daubechies will explain the basic principles of wavelets and illustrate how they are used by scientists as a mathematical tool in many different applications.
Wavelets give a new approach to the analysis of sounds and images, and are used in many other applications. The wavelet transform provides the mathematical analog of a music score: just as the score tells a musician which notes to play when, the wavelet analysis of a sound takes things apart into elementary units with a well defined frequency (which note?) and a well defined time (when?). For images, wavelets allow you to first describe the coarse features with a broad brush, and then later to fill in details, as with the zoom function of a camera. The wavelet transform is sometimes called a "mathematical microscope." More
Beyond Computation
Michael Sipser,
MIT
Tuesday, October 3, 2006 at 7:00 PM
Harvard University Science Center — Hall B
One Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138
In a remarkable 1956 letter, the great logician Kurt Gödel asked the famous mathematician and computer pioneer John von Neumann whether certain computational problems could be solved without resorting to brute force search.More...
Mathematics and Magic Tricks
Persi Diaconis, Stanford University
Tuesday,
April 25, 2006 at 7pm
Stata Center - Kirsch
mathematical microscope.Auditorium, MIT
Persi Diaconis, a leading mathematician and statistician, and recipient of the MacArthur Award, will discuss how the way a magic trick works is sometimes even more amazing than the trick itself. This can be illustrated with a good trick whose working illuminates cryptography, reading DNA strings, robot vision and rhyming patterns in Indian music. The mathematics involves finite fields and the trick leads to the edges of what is known.
More...Escher and the Droste effect
Hendrik Lenstra, Leiden University
Tuesday,
October 25, 2005 at 7pm
Science Center - Lecture Hall
B, Harvard University
In 1956, the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher made an unusual lithograph with the title Print Gallery. It shows a young man viewing a print in an exhibition gallery. Amongst the buildings depicted on the print, he sees paradoxically the very same gallery that he is standing in. A lot is known about the way in which Escher made his lithograph. It is not nearly as well known that it contains a hidden Droste effect, or infinite repetition; but this is brought to light by a mathematical analysis of the studies used by Escher. More...
Are there unsolved problems about numbers?
Barry Mazur, Harvard University
May 3, 2005 at
7pm
Stata Center, MIT
Are there unsolved problems about numbers? The answer is yes, and we will discuss one of the most famous of these open problems, the Riemann hypothesis, which is about the hnumbers. Despite their fundamental importance to mathematics, they represent one of the most tantalizing enigmas in the pursuit of human knowledge. In 1859, the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann put forward an idea idden structure of the prime numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, ... . Primes are the "building blocks" of all numbers, and are key actors in a subject, central to mathematics, initiated two millennia ago by the Greeks. More...
Photos of Riemann's 1859 manuscript courtesy of of the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen. Go here< /a> for the full facsimilie.
Four thousand years of mathematics in images
Bill Casselman, University of British Columbia
April 26, 2005 at 7pm
Science Center Lecture Hall
B, Harvard University
No science has a longer history than mathematics. It is arguable that arithmetic preceded, and even motivated, writing, and it seems to have originated independently in each of the great civilizations. Bill Casselman, has assembled an extensive collection of images, many taken with his own camera, to tell this story, which begins over 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia (present day Iraq). More...
Is there such a thing as Infinity?
Timothy Gowers, Cambridge University
March
22, 2004
Science Center, Lecture Hall A, Harvard
University
Timothy Gowers, recipient of the 1998 Fields Medal for his contributions to functional analysis, delivered the first Clay Mathematics Lecture on Monday, March 22 at 7pm in Lecture Hall A of the Science Center, Harvard University. Professor Gowers spoke on "Is there such a thing as infinity?" More...
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