The HSU Department of Mathematics welcomes Dr. Zvezdelina Stankova, Teaching Professor, Department of Mathematics, UC Berkeley, who will deliver the 74th semi-annual Harry S. Kieval Lecture on Thursday, October 3, 2019. The lecture will be at 7:30 pm in room 135 of the Science-B Building on the Humboldt State University campus. The public is welcome to this free lecture, which is geared to a general audience.
The title of the lecture is “Mission Possible or Impossible?” Dr. Stankova will discuss two fascinating games which take place on a checkerboard: one proposed for the Moscow Math Olympiads in the 1980s by a Russian teenager Maxim Kontsevich (later a Fields medalist), and the other by the British mathematician John Conway (especially known, among many other discoveries, for the invention of the Game of Life). The games can be understood and played by anybody without any technical background. Yet, in solving these games one enters the imaginative and creative realms of mathematical invariants, infinitely many fractions, the golden ratio, and into questioning whether it is possible to prove that something is impossible.
The speaker received her Ph.D. in Mathematics from Harvard University in 1997. She co-founded the Bay Area Mathematical Olympiad and created the Berkeley Math Circle (BMC). She trained the U.S. national team for the olympiad for six years, including the memorable year of 2001 when three of the six team members were BMCers and the USA tied with Russia for second place in the world overall. She worked at Mills College 1999-2016, and she joined the faculty at UC Berkeley in 2016. In 2011 MAA (Mathematical Association of America) honored her with the highest math teaching award in the U.S., the Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teachers who are widely recognized as extraordinarily successful and whose teaching effectiveness has been shown to have influence beyond their own institutions. Zvezda was featured in the Salutes Program of the ABC 7 News in spring 2011 and in 2012, she was listed in Princeton Review’s "300 Best Professors."
The Kieval lecture series is named for HSU Mathematics Professor Emeritus, Dr. Harry S. Kieval, who taught at HSU from 1966 to 1979. The series includes topics on popular and/or broad aspects of mathematics attractive to undergraduates and the public.
Dr. Stankova will also give a separate lecture as a part of the Mathematics Colloquium earlier that day.
That lecture titled, “Restricted Patterns of the Past, Present and Future,” will begin at 4 p.m. in Room 166 of the Behavioral and Social Sciences (BSS) building on the HSU campus. Community members are invited to a pre-colloquium tea starting at 3:15 p.m. on the third floor of the BSS building before the lecture. The colloquium talk is also free to the public. For more information, visit https://math.humboldt.edu/get-involved/mathematics-colloquium.
For more information about Dr. Stankova, visit https://math.berkeley.edu/~stankova/.