Title: A competent translation/a pitiful bungle: The Foundations of Geometry Abstract: David Hilbert’s Grundlagen der Geometrie is a rare example of a historical mathematics text that is still profitably read today and continues to inspire research in mathematics, computer science, and philosophy. The effort of publishing an English translation of Hilbert in 1902 involved a […]

Title: Unsolved Mathematics at Burning Man Abstract: Rising 12 feet tall with an 18-foot wingspan, a 2-ton unfolding dodecahedron comes to life at Burning Man, the world’s most influential large-scale sculpture showcase. The artwork is illuminated by 16,000 LEDs, requiring 6500 build-hours and $50,000 in donated funds, with an interior large enough to hold 15 […]

Title: Nonnegative Polynomials and Sums of Squares Abstract: Is x4-2x3+7x2-2x+1 nonnegative for any value of x? One way of showing that this holds is by writing x4-2x3+7x2-2x+1=1/2(x2-3x+1)2+1/2(x2+x+1)2. Studying the relationship between non-negativity and sums of squares has a distinguished history in mathematics starting with work of David Hilbert and Hilbert's 17th problem. I will discuss […]

Title: Injustice, Inequity, and Inequality: Lessons at the Intersection of Mathematics, Epidemiology, and Racism Registration information for this talk at: https://www.hmc.edu/mathematics/moody-lecture-series/ Abstract:The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed existing health inequities for communities of color in the United States. Racism is a known structural cause of these health inequities. Counterfactuals are essential to our understanding of causal […]

Title: Combinatorics and the Kitchen Sink Abstract: Numerical semigroups are simple combinatorial objects that lead to deep and subtle questions. We answer in one fell swoop virtually all asymptotic questions about factorization lengths in numerical semigroups. Surprisingly, this uses tools from complex, harmonic, and functional analysis, probability theory, algebraic combinatorics, and computer-aided design! Our results […]