Public Lectures
IMA Public Lectures are free and open to the public.
The IMA Public Lecture Series features distinguished mathematicians and scientists who illuminate the role of mathematics in understanding our world and shaping our lives. The purpose of these talks is to give the public a better understanding about how contemporary mathematical ideas are applied to important technological and scientific problems, conveying the significance and excitement of these applications. These engaging and informative lectures are designed for a broad audience, appropriate for middle-school students and older. This well-established series regularly draws diverse audiences of several hundred people.
Videos for past public lectures are available. Please feel free to watch.
| Wednesday, June 26, 2019 - 7:00pm | Very Tiny Knots in Nature |
Kenneth Millett (University of California, Santa Barbara) |
| Wednesday, February 21, 2018 - 7:00pm | Impossible Objects: The Mathematics of 3D Illusions |
Kokichi Sugihara (Meiji University) |
| Tuesday, December 5, 2017 - 7:00pm | Snow Business: Scientific Computing in the Movies and Beyond |
Joseph Teran (University of California, Los Angeles) |
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| Monday, May 15, 2017 - 7:00pm | How Quantum Physics Democratized Music: A Meditation on Physics and Technology |
Michael Berry (University of Bristol) |
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| Thursday, March 9, 2017 - 7:00pm | Magic with Group Testing |
Anna Gilbert (University of Michigan) |
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| Monday, February 13, 2017 - 7:00pm | Inverse Problems and Harry Potter's Cloak |
Gunther Uhlmann (University of Washington) |
| Thursday, March 10, 2016 - 7:00pm | Modeling Tsunamis and Other Geohazards | ||
| Tuesday, February 23, 2016 - 7:00pm | I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that: Linguistics, Statistics, and Artificial Intelligence in the Big Data Era |
Lillian Lee (Cornell University) |
| Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - 7:00pm | The Living Art of Mathematics |
Cédric Villani (Université Claude-Bernard (Lyon I)) |
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| Wednesday, March 11, 2015 - 7:00pm | Waving Tails, Spiny Disks, and Sticky Situations: Explorations in Biological Fluid Dynamics |
Lisa Fauci (Tulane University) |
| Thursday, October 30, 2014 - 7:00pm | Toy Models |
Tadashi Tokieda (University of Cambridge) |
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| Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - 7:00pm | How to Use Geometry to Get Rich Playing the Lottery* |
Jordan Ellenberg (University of Wisconsin, Madison) |
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| Tuesday, April 29, 2014 - 7:00pm | Mathematics in Modern Architecture |
Helmut Pottmann (Technische Universität Wien) |
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| Wednesday, February 12, 2014 - 7:00pm | Keeping Track of the Web |
Carrie Grimes Bostock (Google Inc.) |
| Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - 7:00pm | The Evolution of Cooperation: Why We Need Each Other to Succeed |
Martin Nowak (Harvard University) |
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| Thursday, September 19, 2013 - 7:00pm | From Rubik to Escher to Security: Symmetry from Scratch |
Brian Conrad (Stanford University) |
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| Wednesday, April 3, 2013 - 7:00pm | Mathematics and the Melting Polar Ice Caps |
Kenneth Golden (The University of Utah) |
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| Wednesday, February 27, 2013 - 7:00pm | Math in China, India, and the West— Can We Compare Their Achievements Objectively? |
David Mumford (Brown University) |
| Tuesday, December 4, 2012 - 7:00pm | Alan Turing: The Power of Mathematical Discovery |
Andrew Hodges (Wadham College) |
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| Tuesday, October 16, 2012 - 7:00pm | Private Data, Public Computation |
Kristin Lauter (Microsoft Research) |
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| Wednesday, April 25, 2012 - 7:00pm | The Curious World of Probabilities |
Jeffrey Rosenthal (University of Toronto) |
| Thursday, November 3, 2011 - 7:00pm | Cryptography: Secrets and Lies, Knowledge and Trust |
Avi Wigderson (Institute for Advanced Study) |
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| Tuesday, October 11, 2011 - 7:00pm | Flocks and Fleets: Collective Motion in Nature and Robotics |
Naomi Leonard (Princeton University) |
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| Wednesday, April 13, 2011 - 7:00pm | Recommender Systems for Fun and Profit |
Chris Volinsky (AT&T Laboratories - Research) |
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| Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - 7:00pm | Secrecy, Privacy, and Deception: The Mathematics of Cryptography |
Jill Pipher (Brown University) |
| Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - 7:00pm | Burst, Cascades, and Hot Spots: A Glimpse of Some On-line Social Phenomena at Global Scales |
Jon Kleinberg (Cornell University) |
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| Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - 7:00pm | How Financial Engineering Can Cure Cancer, Solve the Energy Crisis, and Stop Global Warming |
Andrew Lo (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) |
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| Thursday, April 22, 2010 - 7:00pm | Can Chocolate Save Your Life? |
Nancy Reid (University of Toronto) |
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| Tuesday, February 9, 2010 - 7:00pm | From Flapping Birds to Space Telescopes: The Math of Origami |
Robert Lang (Robert J. Lang Origami) |
| Thursday, November 12, 2009 - 7:00pm | The Shape of Space |
Jeffrey Weeks (NONE) |
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| Tuesday, September 22, 2009 - 7:00pm | Chaotic Elections: Why Don't We Elect Who Voters Really Want? |
Donald Saari (University of California) |
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| Tuesday, April 28, 2009 - 7:00pm | Network Science: From the Web to Human Diseases |
Albert-László Barabási (Northeastern University) |
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| Wednesday, March 4, 2009 - 7:00pm | Sports Scheduling and the Practice of Operations Research | ||
| Thursday, January 22, 2009 - 7:00pm | Mathematics Making Sense of Sensors |
Robert Ghrist (University of Pennsylvania) |
| Wednesday, October 29, 2008 - 7:00pm | Surfing with Wavelets |
Ingrid Daubechies (Princeton University) |
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| Tuesday, March 4, 2008 - 7:00pm | The Best of All Possible Worlds: The Idea of Optimization |
Ivar Ekeland (University of British Columbia) |
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| Wednesday, February 13, 2008 - 7:00pm | Mathematical Modeling in Medicine, Sports, and the Environment |
Alfio Quarteroni (Politecnico di Milano) |
| Thursday, November 1, 2007 - 7:00pm | Screening of the Film Achieving the Unachievable with Writer/Director Jean Bergeron |
Jean Bergeron (Alpha-Zoulou Films) |
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| Tuesday, October 9, 2007 - 7:00pm | Algebra, Statistics, Computation, and Biology |
Bernd Sturmfels (University of California, Berkeley) |
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| Wednesday, April 18, 2007 - 7:00pm | Epidemics in Technological and Social Networks; the Downside of Six Degrees of Separation |
Jennifer Chayes (Microsoft Research) |
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| Wednesday, March 7, 2007 - 7:00pm | Patterns Patterns Everywhere |
Martin Golubitsky (University of Houston) |
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| Thursday, January 18, 2007 - 7:00pm | Making Sense of a Complex World |
Christopher Budd (University of Bath) |
| Thursday, November 2, 2006 - 7:00pm | How Hard Can it Be? |
Margaret Wright (New York University) |
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| Wednesday, April 19, 2006 - 7:00pm | Mathematics and Magic Tricks |
Persi Diaconis (Stanford University) |
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| Wednesday, March 22, 2006 - 7:00pm | Gravity's Cosmic Shadows: A Mathematical Unveiling |
Arlie Petters (Duke University) |
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| Wednesday, February 8, 2006 - 7:00pm | Artful Mathematics |
Daniel Rockmore (Dartmouth College) |
| Thursday, December 8, 2005 - 7:00pm | Does Math Matter to Brain Matter? |
Philip Holmes (Princeton University) |
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| Wednesday, March 30, 2005 - 7:00pm | Computers and the Future of Mathematical Proof |
Thomas Hales (University of Pittsburgh) |
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| Wednesday, February 9, 2005 - 7:00pm | Math Behind the Curtains: Dynamic Simulation at Pixar Animation Studios |
David Baraff (Pixar) |
| Thursday, November 18, 2004 - 7:00pm | The Marriage Equation: A Practical Theory for Predicting Divorce and a Scientifically-Based Marital Therapy |
James Murray (University of Washington) |
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| Tuesday, October 5, 2004 - 7:00pm | Does Mathematics Rule the World? |
Roger Penrose FRS (University of Oxford) |
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| Tuesday, March 30, 2004 - 7:00pm | Behavioral Finance - The Closed End Fund Puzzle |
Stephen Ross |
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| Wednesday, January 7, 2004 - 7:00pm | Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order |
Steven Strogatz (Cornell University) |
| Thursday, November 20, 2003 - 7:00pm | Math at Top Speed: Breaking Myths in the Drag Racing Folklore |
Richard Tapia (Rice University) |
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| Monday, September 15, 2003 - 7:00pm | After the Human Genome Project: Systems Biology and Predictive, Preventive and Personalized Medicine |
Leroy Hood (Institute for Systems Biology) |
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| Thursday, June 5, 2003 - 7:00pm | Secrets of the Heart Revealed - by Mathematics and Computer Simulation |
Charles Peskin (New York University) |
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| Tuesday, May 6, 2003 - 7:30pm | Advances in Whole Genome Sequencing |
Gene Myers (University of California, Berkeley) |
| Wednesday, October 16, 2002 - 7:00pm | The Traveling Salesman Problem |
William Cook (Georgia Institute of Technology) |
| Monday, February 12, 2001 - 7:00pm | Natural Laws of Digital Content: the Folly of Copy Protection on the Internet |
Bruce Schneier (Counterpane Internet Security, Inc.) |
| Friday, October 22, 1999 - 7:00pm | Fractals/Multifractals in Finance, the Internet & Other Wild Aspects of Man's Works |
Benoit Mandelbrot (Yale University) |
| Wednesday, November 11, 1998 - 7:00pm | How Mathematics Coupled with Experiment Revealed the Nature of HIV Infection |
Alan Perelson (Los Alamos National Laboratory) |
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| Thursday, April 23, 1998 - 7:00pm | Life's Other Secret: The New Mathematics of the Living World |
Ian Stewart (University of Warwick) |
| Wednesday, December 31, 1969 - 6:00pm |