Marker Lectures in Mathematics Scheduled for 23, 24, 25, and 26 March

Martin Bridson, Whitehead Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Oxford in England, will present the Russell Marker Lectures in Mathematics on 23, 24, 25, and 26 March 2009 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 "The Language of Symmetry and the Grammar of Space," which will be held at 8:00 p.m. on Monday, 23 March, in 114 McAllister Building. Bridson also will give three specialized lectures in 114 McAllister Building: "Dimension, Rigidity, and Fixed-Point Theorems" at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, 24 March; "Approximately Free Groups" at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, 25 March; and "Surfaces, Subdirect Products, and Residually Free Groups" at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, 26 March.

Bridson is a mathematician who works at the interface of geometry, topology, and group theory. He is particularly interested in studying various types of symmetry in mathematics, in quantifying complexity, and in examining notions of curvature.

Bridson's honors include the Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society in 1999, the Forder Lectureship of the New Zealand Mathematical Society in 2005, and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2006. In 2006 he gave an invited talk at the International Congress of Mathematicians.

Bridson received a bachelor's degree from the University of Oxford in 1986. He earned master's and doctoral degrees at Cornell University in 1988 and 1991, respectively. After graduating, he became an assistant professor at Princeton University and a Tutorial Fellow at Pembroke College in Oxford, England. Twice, he spent a year at the University of Geneva in Switzerland as a visiting professor. He was a professor of topology at the University of Oxford until 2001, when he left to become the Chair in Pure Mathematics at Imperial College London. In 2007, he returned to the University of Oxford as the university's first Whitehead Professor of Pure Mathematics.

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.

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