Everett Pitcher Lecture Series

The Pitcher lectures are held in honor of Everett Pitcher, who served in Lehigh's Department of Mathematics from 1938 until 1978, when he retired as Distinguished Professor of Mathematics. He was secretary of the American Mathematical Society from 1967 until 1988.


For more information call 610-758-3731.

      Spring 2010 Everett Pitcher Lectures
                                                                                                                                                                                                         

                 Speaker: Rick Durrett
                                Professor
                                Department of Mathematics
                                Cornell University          

Three Faces of Probability
                      
Lecture For General  Audience
  Truth is stranger than fiction: A look at some improbabilities
   Abstract: I'll talk about a number of situations in which people misunderstand probabilities. This will include some well known examples: Monty Hall problem, birthday problem, and lottery double winners, as well as some newer ones: "cognitive dissonance in monkey" and flaws in Michael Behe's arguments for intelligent design.
Date: Monday, March 22, 2010
Place & Time:

Second Lecture
    Life on a random graph
Date:  Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Place & Time: 

Third Lecture
   Cancer models
Date:  Thursday, March 25, 2010
Place & Time:  


Rick Durrett has fathered 40 acadmic children and written 8 books and 170 papers. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2007.

Past talks are listed below.                                                                               Click here to go back to the Math Department homepage.
 
Month,Year
Speaker
Title of the Talk
April, 1983 R. Bott Some Applications of Equivariant DeRahm Theory
December 1983 J.-P. Serre Rational Points on Algebraic Varieties 
March, 1985  J. Moser Stability of Hamiltonian Systems 
October, 1985 M. Atiyah The Mystery of Four Dimensions 
April, 1987 J. Tate Elliptic Curves and Modular Symbols 
October, 1987 J. Milnor Iterated Polynomial Maps
April, 1989 F. John Non-linear Wave Equations, Formation of Singularities
March, 1990 S. Smale Theory of Computation. On the Problem "P != NP" for the Real and Complex Numbers 
November, 1990 J. Tits Monster and Moonshine: A Survey 
April, 1992 J. Conway Geometry and Numbers 
April, 1993 R. Graham Quasi-randomness and Combinatorics
October, 1993 P. Hall Statistical Estimation of Fractal Dimension
February, 1994 M. Talagrand Isoperimetric Inequalities and Concetration of Measure in Product Spaces 
November, 1994 M. Hopkins Modular Forms and Stable Homotopy 
April, 1996 C. Pomerance Primes: a computational approach 
March, 1997 B. Mandelbrot Fractals in Mathematics and the Sciences
April, 1998 C. Morawetz Revisiting the Wave Equation
April, 1999 H.S. Wilf The Recursive Structure of Combinatorial Families
March, 2001 I. M. Singer Index Theory in Mathematics and Physics
November, 2001 P. Shor  Quantum Information and Computation
July, 2002  J. Birman Recognizing the Unknot
April, 2003 J. Arthur Automorphic Forms and the Trace Formula 
March 2005
 Peter Sarnak
 Arithmetic and analysis on locally symmetric spaces
March 2006
 Sir Roger Penrose
 Before the Big Bang and Twistor Theory
April 2007
 George E. Andrews
 The Indian Genius, Ramanujan: His Life and the Excitement of His Mathematics
March 2008
 Persi Diaconis
 The Search for Randomness
March 2009
Maria Chudnovsky The Perfect Graphs - Structure and Recongition

Click here to go back to the Math Department homepage.