Lecture Series in Mathematics Welcomes UC-San Diego Professor for Two Lectures

Follow us on Twitter: @BaylorUMediaCom

Dr. Ronald Graham, Irwin and Joan Jacobs Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, will present the fifth annual Baylor Undergraduate Lecture Series in Mathematics on Thursday, April 12, and Friday, April 13, on the Baylor University campus. The events are free and open to the public.

Graham's first lecture, "Computers and Mathematics: Problems and Prospects," will be held at 4 p.m. Thursday in Room D109 of the Baylor Sciences Building. He will discuss a variety of mathematical problems in which computers have had, may have or will probably never have a significant role in solving.

His second lecture, "The Combinatorics of Solving Linear Equations," will be held at 3:30 p.m. Friday in Room 344 of the Sid Richardson Building. He will discuss what is known and what is still unknown about Ramsey theory, a major branch of combinatorics which studies properties that are preserved under partitions.

Graham, chief scientist at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, is a mathematician credited by the American Mathematical Society as being "one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years." At the age of 15, he started his university studies at the University of Chicago and went on to receive his doctoral degree in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1962.

For the next 37 years, Graham worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, working on several problems in pure and applied mathematics. In 1999, he returned to California and joined the UC-San Diego faculty. He won the American Mathematical Society's annual Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2003, and he has published five books and more than 320 papers.

About the Baylor Undergraduate Lecture Series in Mathematics
Presented by the Baylor Department of Mathematics, the Baylor Undergraduate Lecture Series in Mathematics was introduced in 2008. The lecture series is aimed at undergraduate and graduate students, as well area high school students and teachers. The series' goal is to interest and attract students to mathematics and mathematics education.
Lecturers chosen for the series are renowned mathematicians with a penchant for teaching mathematics and a clear enthusiasm for the subject. Previous speakers include: Dr. John Oprea, professor of mathematics at Cleveland State University; Dr. Brian Conrey, founding director of the American Institute of Mathematics in Palo Alto, Calif.; and Dr. William Dunham, Truman Koehler Professor of Mathematics at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa.
For more information, call the Baylor Department of Mathematics at (254) 710-3561.
by Katy McDowall, student newswriter, (254) 710-6805