THE RUFUS BOWEN LECTURES

The Bowen Lectures were established by friends and colleagues as a memorial to Rufus Bowen after his untimely death at age 31 in 1978.Born in 1947 in Vallejo, California, Robert Edward (Rufus) Bowen was awarded the AB with prizes for scholarship by the University of California at Berkeley in 1967. His doctorate in Mathematics was completed at Berkeley in 1970 under the direction of Stephen Smale. In that year he was appointed to the faculty of the Department of Mathematics at UCB. He was promoted to the rank of Professor in 1977.

Bowen worked in mathematical dynamics systems theory. His pioneering studies of topological entropy, symbolic dynamics, Markov partitions, and invariant measures are of lasting importance; much of today's research is inspired by his ideas.

Each year the Department of Mathematics invites an outstanding mathematician to deliver the Bowen Lectures on important topics of mathematical research.

At this year's Bowen Lectures, November 4-6, 1997, we are pleased to invite Professor Simon Donaldson to speak. Donaldson was born in 1957 in Cambridge, England. He obtained his BA from Cambridge University in 1979 and his doctorate, under the supervision of Sir Michael Atiyah, from Oxford University in 1983. In 1986 he received a Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berkeley. He is currently a Professor at Stanford University. His research interests center on differential geometry, particularly complex differential geometry and its connections with gauge theory, low-dimensional topology, and symplectic geometry.

The title of his talks is "The Moment Map in Differential Geometry." To read the abstract of Donaldson's lecture, click on Departmental Events on the Mathematics webpage at http://math.berkeley.edu/.

To continue this lecture series, we hope to establish an endowment, the interest from which will pay expenses, including a reception as well as speakers' costs for coming to Berkeley. To contribute to the Bowen Lecture Endowment, please designate "Bowen Lecture Endowment" in the fourth box of the gift form (page 15) or contact Lou Maull at (510) 642-3865 or maull@math.berkeley.edu.