By the Numb3rs Spring 2022 - Department Events

Department Events

Edmund R. Michalik Distinguished Lecture Series

Professor Michael Harris of Columbia University delivered the Edmund R. Michalik Distinguished Lecture on September 30. Professor Harris has published many papers about the Langlands Program, and his lecture was titled What is the Langlands program about? In addition to examples of the mathematical questions and objects at stake in the Langlands program, the main topics of the lecture included serendipity and "aboutness." 

Among the serendipitous occasions mentioned were some of the extraordinary intersections of happenstance that brought about the proof of Fermat's last Theorem in the mid-1990s as an application of the Langlands program, as well as instances where ideas and objects from quantum physics have been brought into the context of the Langlands program.

The discussion of "aboutness" centered upon the contrast between human intelligence and AI, and the human ability to make meaning of things contrasted with "signs on the page" of a formalized proof. The lecture stimulated a number of questions from the audience about the future of the Langlands program.

Magical Math: Carl Wang Erickson’s Outreach Program

The main purpose of Magical Math is to enrich the mathematical experiences of the elementary students who attend, preparing them for success in middle school algebra. While the content is closely modeled on the math topics that the students see in school, it also introduces the students to fun math experiences and compelling characters from the history of math. Another important purpose of Magical Math is to introduce the Pitt undergraduates who lead the program to experiences beyond the classroom, orienting them in the Hill District, primary-level math education, and the rich ecosystem of community engagement professionals and university-community partnerships housed in Pitt's Office of Engagement and Community Affairs.

Colloquium Speaker Jerry Goldstein

I was born in Magee’s Women’s Hospital on August 5, 1941.  I was raised in Squirrel Hill. In 1951, when I turned 10, we moved from our two-bedroom apartment on Hobart Street to a crummy three-bedroom apartment on Shady Avenue, near Allderdice.  Until 1951, I had to share a bedroom with my sister, almost seven years older than I.  She beat me up regularly, but I got my revenge one day and immediately my parents decided that each of us needed our own bedroom. Then life improved. For spending money, I had several jobs, ever since age eleven (including working in a blast furnace).  I went to Carnegie Tech for my degrees, PhD in 1967, when (what became) CMU was still Carnegie Tech. My sister went to Pitt when quotas on Jewish students were still enforced. By my freshman year (1959), the quotas were gone. I married my first wife in the Heinz Chapel (thanks to my sister’s influence) and we had a small reception at the Webster Hall Hotel. In 1967 I went to the Institute for Advanced Study, then to Tulane.  When I married my second wife, Gisele, I moved to a professorship at Louisiana State University (where Gisèle became the first female full professor in mathematics), then we moved to Memphis in 1996 when our son was less than one year old.  We are still in Memphis. Gisele and I have spent summers working/studying in universities in Europe (mainly in Italy and France) each summer since 1990 (except for the COVID year 2020).

My doctoral thesis was in stochastic processes, but eventually, my interests expanded into other areas, including quantum mechanics, scattering theory, fluid dynamics, singular perturbations, blood flow problems, quantum chemistry, mathematical finance, asymptotic, and semigroups of linear and nonlinear operators and their applications. (But not everything all at once.) I served a three-year term on the Advisory Committee for the Division of Mathematical Sciences at NSF. I served on the Committee on the Undergraduate Program in Mathematics for the MAA for fifteen years and chaired it for six.  I served on various committees for the AMS, SIAM and the MAA. I was chair of two Mathematics Departments (Tulane and Memphis). I have never lost my passion for mathematics education and the role of mathematics in advancing science. I have had 30 PhD students.

When Jeff Wheeler invited me to give a colloquium talk at Pitt, I was delighted, especially since my previous invited talk at Pitt was in 1966. I knew Jeff well while he worked on his PhD at Memphis. Jeff and I had much in common, including our concerns about mathematical research and applications and education. In fact, Jeff helped organize the “social life” in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Memphis. The department suffered when he left and moved to Pittsburgh, and we miss his thoughtfulness and organization at Memphis. But our loss was Pitt’s gain. In fact, Jeff has carved out a version of his job involving all the good stuff: research, education, interaction, and broadening everyone’s interests. The spirit in Pitt’s Mathematics Department is wonderful, really impressive, and is a model for other good research departments to follow. Everybody seems to respect what everyone else is doing.

Pitt was good in math in the 1960s, but hiring Bryce McLeod was a real coup, as Bryce was a worldwide superstar, a Royal Society Fellow. In fact, in the British Isles, “pure mathematics” and “applied mathematics” differ in an organized way, which always perplexed me. Good, applied people were typically proud that they didn’t prove everything rigorously.  And the pure people were happy to keep their distance from the applications. This is not how Newton and Hilbert taught us how to do it!  So, Bryce was somewhat unique (for someone from Great Britain) for combining the best of both, and Pitt benefitted greatly from his presence. I interacted with a limited number of people at Pitt during my recent visit, but I was so impressed by the spirit and goodwill I saw there.  It was a pleasure to talk with older scholars like David Kinderlehrer (of CMU) and Bill Troy and hear of their current exciting research ideas, and to pay tribute to my friend Gunduz Caginalp.  The continuing growth and improvement in Mathematics at Pitt is a pleasure to witness. Certainly, Stewart Hastings deserves a lot of credit for this improvement, but so do many others. Being in a good Mathematics Department is a very satisfying thing, and the Pitt Mathematics faculty seems to have achieved this (difficult to attain) accomplishment. It seems like all the students wear Pitt T-shirts and sweatshirts, and very proudly. That is nice! And after my “popular” talk on the “apportionment problem”, the students seemed to be very thoughtful and engaged. That kind of mutual liking and trust is hard to achieve, and it normally doesn’t last forever.  But at Pitt it seems to be semi-stable, that is, stable for a pretty long time period.  And this I think is the best one can hope for (with apologies to Conan the grammarian). Moreover, Pitt and Carnegie Mellon form two neighboring excellent centers of mathematical activity, which puts Pittsburgh on every American mathematician’s list of good places.

First Fridays: Association for Women in Mathematics Seminar

Since 2021, First Fridays features two 30-minute-long talks by female PhD students from all around the world, each presenting the speaker's research outcomes. Our seminars hope to give a platform to female student researchers, to promote the spirit of collegiality and collaboration, and recognize the hard work of students during this pandemic time.

Watch University of Tennessee PhD student Charlotte Beckford’s October 7 talk, “Hybrid model of winter tick epizootics in moose”, by visiting the website.

You also enjoy past seminars here. Talks are video-recorded and made available on our YouTube Channel (subject to each speaker's permission). Tune in to First Fridays on Fridays at 4:45 p.m. Seminars are held virtually on Zoom. Meeting ID: 96524480571. Password: awmpitt

Find out what’s next at: Pitt AWM Student Seminar Series | Department of Mathematics | University of Pittsburgh