In his talk, titled “Through the Looking Glass: Symmetry, the Fourth Dimension, and Beyond,” Farb will explore intriguing questions like “Why are our mirror images reflected left-right but not up-down? What does the fourth dimension look like? How is it possible that a square box can be big enough to hold only one round marble, but the marble only takes up a trillionth of the space in the box?” Surprisingly, according to Farb, these questions can have a profound influence on everyday life.
Farb is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Chicago, where he studies geometry, topology, group theory, representation theory and their interactions. He arrived at Chicago as a postdoctoral researcher in 1994, just after earning his Ph.D. from Princeton. Currently, Farb has had 34 Ph.D. students, including 15 women. He has authored 64 papers and five books, and his awards include a Sloan Foundation Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Career award. He was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematics Society in 2012, and was invited to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Seoul in 2014.
The Kieval Lecture is an endowed lecture series established by the late Professor Emeritus Harry S. Kieval. Every semester the Department of Mathematics hosts renowned speakers who present engaging lectures on popular mathematics topics to students and the public. This is the series’ 32nd year.