Marker Lectures in Mathematics Scheduled for 17, 18, 19, and 20 November
5 November 2008 — Terence Tao, a professor of mathematics at the University of California at Los Angeles, will present the Russell Marker Lectures in Mathematics on 17, 18, 19, and 20 November 2008 at the Penn State University Park campus. The free public lectures are sponsored by the Penn State Eberly College of Science.
The series includes a lecture intended for a general audience, titled "Long Arithmetic Progressions of Primes," which will be held at 8:00 p.m. on Monday, 17 November in 101 Thomas Building. Tao also will give three specialized lectures in 114 McAllister Building: "Linear Equations in Primes" at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, 18 November; "Small Gaps Between Primes" at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, 19 November; and "Sieving for Almost Primes and Expander Graphs" at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, 20 November.
Tao is a mathematician who studies harmonic analysis, geometric combinatorics, arithmetic combinatorics, analytic number theory, compressed sensing, and algebraic combinatorics. He is, perhaps, best known for his proof of the existence of arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions of prime numbers, which he derived in partnership with British mathematician Ben J. Green.
Tao received the Salem Prize in 2000, the Bôcher Prize in 2002, the Clay Research Award in 2003, and the American Mathematical Society's Levi L. Conant Prize in 2005. In 2006, he was awarded the Fields Medal, which is considered to be the highest honor a mathematician can receive. Later in 2006, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2007.
Tao earned a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in mathematics at the Flinders University of South Australia. In 1996, he received a Ph.D. degree from Princeton University. Later that year, he joined the faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles. He was promoted to full professor in 1999 at the age of 24, and he continues to be the youngest person ever to be appointed to the rank of full professor by the university.
The Marker Lectures were established in 1984 through a gift from Russell Earl Marker, professor emeritus of chemistry at Penn State, whose pioneering synthetic methods revolutionized the steroid-hormone industry and opened the door to the current era of hormone therapies, including the birth-control pill. The Marker endowment allows the Penn State Eberly College of Science to present annual Marker Lectures in astronomy and astrophysics, the chemical sciences, evolutionary biology, genetic engineering, the mathematical sciences, and physics. For more information about the lectures, contact Flossie Dunlop at (814) 865-8462.
[ Sara LaJeunesse]
