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Photo credit: © SCOOP / Sandro Most |
A Selection of April Speakers
On April 7, Günter Ziegler (pictured) will deliver the annual Winifred Asprey lecture in Mathematics, titled “Proofs from THE BOOK,” at 5:00 p.m. in Rockefeller 300. Ziegler, a professor at the Technical University of Berlin, will refute Wittgenstein’s famous claim that the moment of surprise in mathematical proofs will disappear. He will explain some exciting new proofs, including Neil Calkin and Herb Wilf’s tree method for enumerating the rational numbers, Paul Monsky’s proof that a square cannot be split into an odd number of equal-area triangles, and Josh Greene’s surprising solution for Kneser’s conjecture about graph coloring. Explore Professor Ziegler’s work.
On April 8, Neil MacFarquhar will deliver the annual Frederic C. Wood lecture, titled “Happy Birthday from Hizbollah: The Case for Change in the Middle East” at 5:30 p.m. in Sanders Auditorium. MacFarquhar has spent more than 25 years in the Middle East, including five years in Cairo as the bureau chief for The New York Times, preceded by a seven-year stint as a correspondent for The Associated Press during which he lived in Israel, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Cyprus. He now works as the Times bureau chief at the United Nations and has written two books, one about the Middle East and a work of fiction about foreign correspondents.Visit MacFarquhar’s website.
On April 15, Dr. Richard Ostfeld, a disease ecologist, will deliver a lecture about decreasing biodiversity and the rise of emerging infectious diseases at 5:00 p.m. in Sanders Physics 207. Ostfeld is Senior Scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, NY, a world-renowned center for applying the ecosystem approach to some of society’s most pressing problems. Learn more about the Cary Institute.
On April 19, the former U.S. Ambassador to Chile, Bolivia, and Colombia Curtis Kamman will speak at 7:00 p.m. in Rockefeller 300 about U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. The lecture is titled “Celebrating 200 Years of Gringo Diplomacy” and will explore the issues that face the U.S. in Latin America as well as how those nations view the “Gringo colossus.” Kamman has also taught diplomacy and U.S. foreign policy at the University of Notre Dame. Read more in the press release.