Walden Freedman

Dr. Richard Evan Schwartz, Chancellor’s Professor of Mathematics at Brown University, will deliver the 75th semi-annual Harry S. Kieval Lecture at HSU on Tuesday, February 18th. 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 toward a general audience.
The title of the lecture is “Geometry and Experiment”. Dr. Schwartz will give a guided tour through some of the graphical user interfaces he has made. The first few programs, mostly demos, give neat and sometimes unexpected geometric pictures of some well-known topics in mathematics. The last few are more extensive programs which reveal hidden structure in simply stated but deceptively deep geometry problems.
Dr. Schwartz was born and raised in Los Angeles. He loved math from a very young age but got distracted by tennis, video games, and mild forms of juvenile delinquency until getting serious about the subject again during high school. He majored in mathematics at UCLA, then got a PhD in mathematics at Princeton under the loose supervision of Bill Thurston.
Dr. Schwartz was an invited speaker at the 2002 International Congress of Mathematicians, and has held various fellowships, such as a Sloan Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Clay Fellowship, and Simons Fellowships. He likes to explore simple problems in geometry, topology, and dynamics with the computer and then find traditional or computer-assisted proofs of the phenomena that the experiments turn up.
He is also the author of several children's picture books about mathematics, like "Really Big Numbers" and "Life on the Infinite Farm", and a number of offbeat self-published comic books, like "Man Versus Dog" and "The Extra Toaster". He is married to a fiber artist and has two daughters.
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. Schwartz will also give a separate lecture as a part of the Mathematics Colloquium earlier that day. That lecture titled, “The Spheres of Sol,” 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 around 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/getinvolved/mathe atics-colloquium.
For more information about Dr. Schwartz, visit https://www.math.brown.edu/~res/.