CCMS Colloquium: Inaugurual Barbara Beechler Lecture

CCMS Colloquium invites you to the final talk of the 2023-2024 academic year and the inaugural Barbara Beechler Lecture by Professor Judy Grabiner, Flora Sanborn Pitzer Professor of Mathematics Emerita.

Title: It’s All for the Best: Optimization in the History of Science

Abstract: Many problems, from optics to economics, can be solved mathematically by finding the highest, the quickest, the shortest – the best of something. This has been true from antiquity to the present. Why did we start looking for such explanations, and how did we conclude that we could productively do so? Scientific examples will include problems from ancient optics, and more modern questions in optics and classical mechanics, drawing on ideas from Newton’s and Leibniz’s calculus and from the Euler-Lagrange calculus of variations. A surprising role will also be played by philosophical and theological ideas, including those of Leibniz, Maupertuis, MacLaurin, and Adam Smith.

Speaker Bio: Judith V. Grabiner received her B.S. in mathematics with honors from the University of Chicago, and her PhD at Harvard in the History of Science, with advisors I Bernard Cohen and Dirk Struik. For fourteen years she was a Professor of History at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and then for thirty years was Professor of Mathematics at Pitzer College. She has also taught at various times at Harvard, UC Santa Barbara, Cal State LA, UCLA, Pomona College, and the University of Leeds in England.

Her publications have received three Carl B. Allendoerfer Awards for the best article in Mathematics Magazine, and she is the only four-time winner of the MAA’s Lester Ford award for best article in the American Mathematical Monthly. In 2003 she received the MAA’s Haimo award for teaching mathematics, principally for her courses in mathematics for liberal arts students. In 2014 her book A Historian Looks Back: The Calculus as Algebra and Selected Writings won the Beckenbach Book Prize from the MAA. She is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and in 2021 won the Albert Leon Whiteman prize from the AMS for what they called “her outstanding contributions to the history of mathematics, in particular her works on Cauchy, Lagrange, and MacLaurin; her widely-recognized gift for expository writing; and a distinguished career of teaching, lecturing, and numerous publications promoting a better understanding of mathematics and the significant roles it plays in culture generally.”