Professor Tom Hales had the honor of delivering the I.E. Block Community Lecture at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Annual Meeting on July 11. Hales’s lecture, “How Paradoxes Shape Mathematics and Give Us Self-Verifying Computer Programs”, included a stimulating tour of a variety of amusing paradoxes ranging from the simple (“this statement is a lie”) to the deep, provided a brief tour of the history of paradox, and connected with Hales’s recent work to develop computer tools for rigorous mathematics.
I. E. Block Community Lecture was named in honor of I. E. Block, a co-founder and the first managing director of SIAM, this lecture is open to the public at the SIAM Annual Meeting. It is intended to encourage public appreciation of applied mathematics and computational science by reaching out to the local community.