Miller Distinguished Lecture

April 22 , 2008

1414 Molecular Biology Building

4:10 p.m.

 

This lecture was made possible in part by the generosity of F. Wendell Miller, who left his entire estate jointly to Iowa State University and the University of Iowa. Mr. Miller, who died in 1995 at age 97, was born in Altoona, Illinois, grew up in Rockwell City, graduated from Grinnell College and Harvard Law School and practiced law in Des Moines and Chicago before returning to Rockwell City to manage his family's farm holdings and to practice law. His will helped to establish the F. Wendell Miller Trust, the annual earnings on which, in part, helped to support this activity.

 

The Departments of Computer Science, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics and the Information Assurance Center at Iowa State University are proud to announce the Miller Distinguished Lecture:

The Indian genius, Ramanujan:
His life and the excitement of his mathematics

Dr. George Andrews, Evan Pugh Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University


RamanujanAbstract

This talk focuses on the famous Indian genius, Ramanujan, and will provide an account of his amazing, albeit short life. We shall try to lead gently from some simple problems involving Fibonacci numbers to a discussion of some of Ramanujan’s achievements.
This will be a talk for a general audience. The first half of the talk will rely at most on arithmetic. All of the remainder of the talk should be easily understood by anyone who has taken calculus, and much of it can be understood by students currently taking calculus.

Biography

George Andrews is Evan Pugh Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University and an expert on the theory of partitions.

He has a long-term interest in the work of S. Ramanujan, whose last notebook he unearthed in 1976. He is now collaborating with Bruce Berndt on a series of volumes explicating the brilliant and sometimes enigmatic ideas in this notebook. In addition, George Andrews has written George Andrewsmore than 250 scientific papers, and several books on number theory and the theory of partitions.

George Andrews is a member of National Academy of Sciences, and he is the president elect of the American Mathematical Society. He serves a member of Editorial Boards of many journals including Discrete Mathematics, the Journal of Combinatorial Theory (A), the Ramanujan Journal.


Refreshments will be served in the lobby following the lecture.