The purpose of this lecture series is to bring in mathematicians who are nationally and internationally recognized for their research and contributions to mathematics. Funds were made available for this new lecture series, started in 2007, by the Baylor administration; special thanks to Dean Lee Nordt of the College of Arts and Sciences for his support.

Previous Speakers: Avner Friedman (2007), Vaughan Jones (2008), Sir Michael Berry (2009)

Fourth Annual 2010-2011 Baylor Lecture Series in Mathematics

Speaker: George Andrews

Professor George Andrews, Professor of Mathematics at The Pennsylvania State University and the current President of the American Mathematical Society, will be the fourth speaker in this annual series. Professor Andrews will be visiting Baylor University from April 13-16, 2010. The title and abstract of his public lecture is given below; further details of his second lecture are forthcoming.

Professor Andrews graduated from Oregon State University in 1960 with simultaneous bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics. He spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar in Cambridge, England, and then entered graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA) in 1961, where he earned his doctorate in 1964, under the supervision of Hans Rademacher. He worked at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1976-77, after which he went to Cambridge to look for historic works in the Wren Library of Trinity College. There he found pages of mathematical work in Srinivasa Ramanujan's own handwriting. This discovery led to Andrews' spending thirty years on the hundreds of results in what he called Ramanujan's Lost Notebook. In addition to being a world-renowned expert on Ramanujan's work, Andrews has also been involved in computer algebra and teaching, has given many lectures, was on the committee that wrote problems for the Putnam Exam, and has served on the editorial boards of several mathematics journals and on the AMS Committee on Libraries, AMS Committee on the History of Mathematics, among others.

Professor Andrews is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been a Fulbright Scholar as well as a Guggenheim Fellow.

Dr. Andrews is an internationally renowned researcher (in various areas of number theory and combinatorics) and teacher of mathematics. He has received a Distinguished Teaching Award from the Mathematical Association of America. He has also been honored by the MAA as both a Hedrick Lecturer and Polya Lecturer and he has given several invited addresses for the American Mathematical Society.

Professor Andrews has more than 250 journal publications, seven textbooks, and he is an editor of seven other books in mathematics. In addition, he is a member or managing editor of twelve highly ranked mathematics journals, including Discrete Mathematics, the Ramanujan Journal, Contemporary Mathematics, Journal of Combinatorial Theory, and the Annals of Combinatorics.

For a poster advertising Professor Andrew's public lecture, click here.

Professor Andrew's public lecture:

April 14 at 7:00 pm in D109 of the Baylor Sciences Building:

Public Lecture: Ramanujan and His Amazing Lost Notebook

Abstract: In 1976 quite by accident, I stumbled across a collection of about 100 sheets of mathematics in Ramanujan's handwriting; they were stored in a box in the Trinity College Library in Cambridge. I titled this collection "Ramanujan's Lost Notebook" to distinguish it from the famous notebooks that he had prepared earlier in his life. On and off for the past 34 years, I have studied these wild and confusing pages. In this talk, I will describe Ramanujan's life and discuss the disappearance of this important work for more than 50 years. I will then provide an elementary description of some of the more surprising discoveries in the Lost Notebook.