Public Lectures
Four thousand years of mathematics in images
Bill Casselman, University of British Columbia
April 26, 2005 at 7pm
Science Center Lecture Hall B, Harvard University
No science has a longer history than mathematics. It is arguable that arithmetic preceded, and even motivated, writing, and it seems to have originated independently in each of the great civilizations. Bill Casselman, has assembled an extensive collection of images, many taken with his own camera, to tell this story, which begins over 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia (present day Iraq). More...
Are there unsolved problems about numbers?
Barry Mazur, Harvard University
May 3, 2005 at 7pm
Stata Center, MIT
Are there unsolved problems about numbers? The answer is yes, and we will discuss one of the most famous of these open problems, the Riemann hypothesis, which is about the hidden structure of the prime numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, ... . Primes are the "building blocks" of all numbers, and are key actors in a subject, central to mathematics, initiated two millennia ago by the Greeks. More...
Photos of Riemann's 1859 manuscript courtesy of of the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen. Go here for the full facsimilie.
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