Lonseth and Milne Lectures
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Lonseth Lectures
The Lonseth lecture series was established in 1985 to honor Arvid T. Lonseth, Professor Emeritus and former chair of the Mathematics Department at Oregon State University. Professor Lonseth was a superb and devoted scholar and teacher of mathematics. The lecture series is a continuing testimony to Arvid's strong interest and commitment to the mathematical education of students, especially undergraduates. He earned his B.A. in mathematics at Stanford University and his doctorate under Hans Lewy at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1939. His research was principally in integral equations, the calculus of variations, and computational methods. He joined the OSU Mathematics Department in 1948 at the invitation of department chair W. E. Milne and was promoted to full professor three years later. During his tenure as department chair from academic year 1954-55 to March of 1968, Professor Lonseth set the department firmly and successfully on its present course: a department with wide expertise, with a special interest in mathematics of the world around us, and with a dedication to undergraduate education. He retired in 1978, but his interest in teaching and learning never waned. Professor Lonseth attended virtually all of the Lonseth lectures until his death in April 2002. He always viewed video tapes of the lectures he could not attend due to poor health. These lectures remind us of our debt to Arvid.
| Date/Time | Location | Speaker | University | Local Speaker | Title | Abstract | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 05-02-2006 14:00 | LaSells Stewart Center | Professor Peter Lax | Degenerate Symmetric Matrices | Abstract: If a finite group G acts on a set X in such a way that each non-trivial element of G fixes a unique point, then they all must fix the same point (i.e. G has a global fixed point which is necessarily unique). We will cover the proof of this result as given in a paper by Max Forester and Colin Rourke. | |||
| 05-27-2008 16:00 | LaSells Stewart Center | John W. Lee | Weierstrass Approximation Theorems | Weierstrass published his celebrated approximation theorems in July of 1885. I will start with brief speculations on the antecedents of Weierstrass' work and move on to a selective survey of results and/or proofs related to Weierstrass' original theorems. The survey will include results and/or proofs of Lebesgue, Landau, de la Vallee Poussin, Bernstein, Korovkin, and Stone, as time permits. | |||
| 05-11-2010 14:00 | Speaker and title to be announced for 2010 | ||||||
| 05-25-1995 12:00 | Ronald L. Graham | AT&T Bell Labs | Mathematics and Computers: Recent Successes and insurmountable Challenges | There is no question that the recent advent of the modern computer has had a dramatic impact on what mathematicians do and how they do it. However, there is increasing belief that many apparently simple problems may in fact be forever beyond any conceivable computer approach. In the talk I will describe a variety of mathematical problems in which computers either have had, may have or will probably never have a significant role in their solutions. | |||
| 05-06-1997 12:00 | Margaret Wright | Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies | Model, Speed up, Optimize, Remodel: Fun and Profit for Mathematics and It's Friends | Mathematics plays a major role in formulating and modeling real-world problems--but models are never right the first time. So mathematics also enters in speeding up complicated calculations, optimizing whatever the current model may be, figuring out its defects, and then producing a more realistic model. This talk will describe how mathematicians and computer scientists have worked with experts in radio engineering and user interface design to produce not only a useful product for Lucent Technologies (a software tool for designing wireless communication systems), but also original mathematical research in optimization and computational geometry. | |||
| 04-29-2003 12:00 | John H. Ewing | Executive Director American Mathematical Society | The Mathematics Inside Your Computer | Computers don't operate using only bits and bytes to perform logic and arithmetic. They use sophisticated mathematics to perform many of the routine tasks you take for granted every time you turn on your machine. This talk will survey a small sample of that sophisticated mathematics, from an unsophisticated point of view. | |||
| 05-10-2005 14:00 | LaSells Stewart Center | Doug Arnold | Institute for Mathematics and its Applications, University of Minnesota | The New Mathematical Gravitational Astronomy | Contemporary understanding of the cosmos is based on on Einstein's amazing insight that gravity is simply a manifestation of curvature. One ineluctable, though subtle, consequence of this theory of general relativity, is that violent cosmic events--imagine two black holes wildly orbiting around each other in the moments before they merge--emit gravitational signals that propagate off into space. The nascent field of gravitational astronomy seeks to use these tiny ripples on surface of spacetime as our first window to the universe looking outside of the electromagnetic spectrum. The technological and scientific challenges of detecting gravity waves are immense, but the mathematical difficulties which must to be overcome to interpret these signals through computer simulation of general relativity may be the greatest of all. This lecture, held during the centenary of Einstein's annus mirabilis and on the heels of 2005 Mathematics Awareness Month dedicated to the theme Mathematics and the Cosmos, will discuss the fascinating emerging science of gravitational astronomy and the mathematics and mathematical challenges at its heart. | ||
| 05-19-1987 12:00 | Gilbert Strang | MIT | Chaos: Strange Attractors and Fractuals | Professor Strang is noted for his illuminating lectures on a wide variety of mathematical topics. His talk should appeal to students and former students of mathematics and also to teachers of mathematics from high school through graduate school. | |||
| 05-16-2000 12:00 | Constance Reid | Noted Mathematical Historian and Biographer | The Improbable Life of Richard Courant | Almost thirty years after his death, Richard Courant remains a highly controversial figure in mathematics, complex and contradictory; but the message he emphasized throughout his long career was one that he had absorbed in his youth in Gottingen from David Hilbert and Felix Klein--the underlying unity of all the mathematical sciences, pure and applied. | |||
| 05-05-1998 12:00 | Philip A. Anselone | Oregon State University | The Power of Calculus: The legacy of Newton | Isaac Newton developed calculus and used it to derive universal laws of motion and gravitation that apply not only on Earth but also to the planets and stars. His laws justify and explain the pervious discoveries of Galileo and Kepler. Newton's laws, particularly force equals mass times acceleration and the universal law of gravitation, are introduced in calculus classes, but usually there isn't enough time to deal adequately with their all-important consequences. The result is that students do not fully appreciate the extraordinary magnitude of Newton's accomplishments. In this lecture we shall discuss three topics that stem directly from Newton's laws: 1. Escape velocity of a projectile launched from the Earth; 2. The derivation of Kepler's laws of planetary motion; 3. The representation of solid bodies as point masses. Even today some of the details of Newton's analysis have to be sketched in order to make the arguments reasonably accessible to calculus students. | |||
| 05-16-1989 12:00 | George Andrews | Pennsylvania State University | Ramanujan's Lost Notebook | The "Lost" Notebook provides us with a record (probably incomplete) of Ramanujan's discoveries during the last year of his life. A number of his formulas from this document have been proved and analyzed; however, many remain unproved and totally mysterious. We shall survey some of the topics covered by the "Lost" Notebook, and we shall consider some of those formulas which are still open. | |||
| 05-19-1992 12:00 | John Horton Conway | Princeton University | On the Shape of Things | Conway is recognized for his studies in combinatorics and group theory, which is the branch of algebra that studies the properties of symmetries of figures, and how you can go from one symmetry to another. Conway has made some major an fundamental discoveries in this field. | |||
| 05-08-2007 15:30 | LaSells Stewart Center | Professor Jim Douglas, Jr. | Purdue University | The Role of Capillarity in Multiphase Flow in Porous Media | Professor Lonseth was very interested in seeing that mathematics interact with other disciplines to improve the understanding of phenomena in these disciplines, and this lecture will be devoted to showing by three examples the importance of including the effects of capillarity in approximating multiphase flows in porous media. The first example involves a simple laboratory experiment and was responsible for reorienting an experimental procedure in a major petroleum research laboratory. The second relates to the mathematical description of multiphase flow in fractured media, where omitting capillarity leads to a seriously incorrect model. The third example, which concerns three-phase flow, exhibits a nonstandard shock that is incorrectly simulated (or not found) without capillarity. The presentation will not require expertise in simulating flows in porous media. | ||
| 05-07-1996 12:00 | Robert Osserman | Stanford University | The Shape of the Universe | Mathematics plays a major role in formulating and modeling real-world problems--but models are never right the first time. So mathematics also enters in speeding up complicated calculations, optimizing whatever the current model may be, figuring out its defects, and then producing a more realistic model. This talk will describe how mathematicians and computer scientists have worked with experts in radio engineering and user interface design to produce not only a useful product for Lucent Technologies (a software tool for designing wireless communication systems), but also original mathematical research in optimization and computational geometry. | |||
| 05-24-1994 12:00 | Tsit-Yuen Lam | University of California-Berkeley | Mistakes We all Made: How Error-Free is Mathematics? | Mathematics, as a subject, derives its beauty from its internal consistency and sound logic. It is thus axiomatic that the proofs and argumentations used in the development of mathematics be absolutely accurate and error-free. Yet the history of mathematics is replete with instances of false starts, half-truths, and incomplete or downright erroneous arguments. Even the greatest of mathematicians are known to have erred in their proofs. In the talk, Professor Lam will give a light-hearted view of some of the famous (or infamous) errors made in the long history of mathematics. Along the way, he will also comment on the pedagogical values of mistakes in mathematics, and discuss ways by which we may try to minimize our mistakes. | |||
| 05-17-1988 12:00 | G. D. Chakerian | University of California-Davis | Cantor Dust Under a Binary Tree | This lecture will deal with some of the more paradoxical properties of the real numbers, from a geometrical point of view. In particular, the famous Cantor ternary set will be used to illustrate the idea of a fractal, a set of fractional dimension. | |||
| 05-18-1999 12:00 | Kenneth A. Ross | University of Oregon | The Mathematics of Card Shuffling | How many times do you have to shuffle a deck of cards before it is well mixed? What do we mean by well mixed? Questions like this will be discussed and seen to lead to the study of random walks on certain finite groups. This is an expository talk on work by Persi Diaconis and his colleagues, though a colleague of mine and I have obtained some related but more technical results. | |||
| 05-20-1986 12:00 | Ivan Niven | University of Oregon | Some Surprising Results in Elementary Mathematics | Although the background assumed is modest, the results are ingenious and not widely known. Professor Niven is noted for his lucid presentations of mathematical ideas. His lecture should appeal to students and former students of mathematics and also to teachers of mathematics from high school through graduate school. | |||
| 05-19-2009 15:00 | LaSells Stewart Center | Robert Daverman | University of Tennessee, A.M.S. | Mysteries of the Cantor Set | The Cantor set exhibits captivating and, occasionally, bizarre phenomena in diverse branches of mathematics. And it is a fundamentally important object -- anyone who completely understands the Cantor set is assured of mathematical success. This talk will describe some beguiling Cantor set properties and will conclude with several questions about it which the speaker wishes someone would/could answer. | ||
| 05-14-1991 12:00 | Ian Stewart | University of Warwick | Four Encounters With Sierpinski's Gasket | Sierpinski's gasket is a fractal, obtained by repeatedly deleting the middle section of a triangle. It shows up in a number of different areas of mathematics, with surprising cross-connections. The talk will describe four occurrences of the gasket: 1. What Sierpinski originally invented it for; 2. Parity of binomial coefficients; 3. The Tower of Hanoi puzzle; 4. Michael Barnsley's Chaos Game. |