Math Matters: IMA Public Lectures

IMA Public Lecture Series" Math Matters" features distinguished mathematicians and scientists who are also superb expositors and are able to illuminate the role mathematics plays in understanding our world and shaping our lives.

Summary of the talks

Bernd Sturmfels

The first public lecture of the year 2007, Algebra, Statistics, Computation, and Biology, October 9, 2007 was delivered by Bernd Sturmfels of the Department of Mathematics University of California - Berkeley. Over 300 people, more than 100 of which were high school students, attended this inspiring, educational and entertaining lecture. In his lecture, Sturmfels, who is one of the founders of the new field of algebraic statistics, introduced the subject of algebraic statistics and described its emerging applications to genome science and developmental biology by using a fictional character named DiaNA who plays hopscotch and rolls tetrahedral dice with faces labeled "A," "C," "G," and "T " to produce DNA sequences of human genomes. Bernd answered several questions that arise about the genomic statistical models using discrete mathematics, tropical arithmetic and dynamic programming. You can read more about this topic in the book "Algebraic statistics for computational biology", by Lior Pachter and Bernd Stumfels. After Bernd's lecture several of the students who were inspired by the lecture initiated talks with him, asked many questions and had their pictures taken with the speaker.

Jean Bergeron
This year for the second public lecture of the year we had a film by Jean Bergeron, a film writer and director, entitled Achieving the Unachievable, on Thursday, November 1, 2007. This was the U.S. premier of the film, a documentary relating math and the art of M.C. Escher, and it was a tremendous success. Over 700 M.C. Escher enthusiasts including students, faculty, film critics and many others gathered in Willey Hall at the University of Minnesota to view the film.

The story of the film began with M.C. Escher's 1956 lithograph, "The Print Gallery", which was left uncompleted because the artist found himself trapped by a seemingly insuperable barrier in the complex pattern of the image. The puzzling enigma of his uncompleted masterpiece was solved half a century later, when mathematician Hendrik Lenstra drew a fantastic bridge between the intuition of the artist and his own, and completed the work mathematically. The film illustrated many of the mathematical structures that entered into Escher's work, including Möbius Transformations, which were shown in an excerpt from a short video by IMA director Douglas Arnold and colleague Jonathan Rogness, which is currently the top featured video on www.youtube.com www.ima.umn.edu/~arnold/moebius/ ) .

After the screening, the film's director, Jean Bergeron, who had flown from Montreal for the premier, answered many questions from the audience. This film has been subject of many articles including a recent article in the December issue of SIAM written by Donald Kahn, University of Minnesota professor.