The Chern Lectures
The Shiing-Shen Chern Chair in Mathematics was established by a generous donation by Dr. Robert G. Uomini, a 1976 graduate from UC Berkeley, and Ms. Louise B. Bidwell in honor of one of the 20th century's greatest geometers, Shiing-Shen Chern, Professor Emeritus, UC Berkeley. Funds from the endowment are used to support one or more distinguished visiting mathematicians each year as well as teaching and research activities related to the visitors. The visitors are referred to as The Shiing-Shen Chern Visiting Professors.
The 2012 Chern Lectures will be given by Jean Bourgain, of the Institue of Advanced Studies, on April 10th, 12th, 17th, and 19th.
Series title: Group expansion,spectral gaps and applications
Lecture 1:
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm, Room 1, LeConte Hall
The notion of expander families; Selberg's theorem on congruence Cayley graphs of SL2(Z), the Lubotzky-Weiss conjecture and the present state of the art.
A dinner in honor of the speaker will be held on Tuesday, April 10 at 6:30 pm at Venezia Restaurant, 1799 University Av. Open to all.
Please inquire about special pricing. To sign up please send an email to chorin [at] math [dot] berkeley [dot] edu.
Lecture 2:
Thursday, April 12, 2012
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm, Room 60, Evans Hall
Spectral gaps; hyperbolic lattice point counting, Lax-Phillips theory and the thermodynamical approach;first arithmetical applications to prime number sieving in the orbits of thin groups.
Lecture 3:
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm, Room TBA
Diophantine applications; curvatures in Apollonian circle packings and Zaremba's conjecture on continued fraction expansions, finiteness in arithmetic geometry.
Lecture 4:
Thursday, April 19, 2012
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm, Room 60, Evans Hall
Spectral gaps in Lie groups; the unitary group and applications to quantum computation and stochastic tilings; SL2 (R) and its relevance to questions in computer science and the theory of random matrix products.
Professor Chern (1911-2004) is widely regarded as the greatest geometer of his generation. For more than six decades, he was a leader in the field of differential geometry and made significant contributions to such diverse areas as the geometry of fibre bundles, complex geometry, web geometry, integral geometry, Nevalinna theory, and the classical theory of submanifolds in euclidean space. Professor Chern completed his doctorate in 1936 in Hamburg. During his stay at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1943-1945, he did his ground-breaking work on characteristic classes and fibre bundles. When he returned to China in 1946, he set himself the task of introducing modern mathematics to China and succeeded in training a new generation of Chinese mathematicians. Professor Chern taught at the University of Chicago from 1949 to 1960, when he came to Berkeley. He was a co-founder of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley. He retired in 1979.
Additional biographical information can be found at:
http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/inmemoriam/shiingshenchern.htm
Past Chern Visiting Professors
1996 Sir Michael Atiyah
1997 Richard Stanley
1998 Friedrich Hirzebruch
1999 Michael Artin
Yuri Manin
2000 Don Zagier
2001 Joseph Bernstein
Peter Lax
Bertram Kostant
2005 Terence Tao
2007 Vladimir Igorevich Arnold
2008 Dennis Sullivan
2009 Richard Taylor
2010 Peter S. Ozsvath
2011 Andrei Okounkov
