Prof. Doron Zeilberger (Dr. Z) will speak on September 26th at 3:00 p.m. in Oliver Hall room 2084.  The title of his talk is “Some Profound Thoughts About the Centipede Game.”  A departmental tea, preceding the talk, starts at 2:00.


Doron Zeilberger is an Israeli mathematician, known for his work in combinatorics.  He is a Board of Governors Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University.  He received his doctorate from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1976, under the direction of Harry Dym.


Zeilberger has made numerous important contributions to combinatorics, hypergeometric identities, and q-series. Zeilberger gave the first proof of the alternating sign matrix conjecture, noteworthy not only for its mathematical content, but also for the fact that Zeilberger recruited nearly a hundred volunteer checkers to "pre-referee" the paper. Together with Herbert Wilf, Zeilberger was awarded the American Mathematical Society's Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contributions to Research in 1998 for their development of WZ theory, which has revolutionized the field of hypergeometric summation. In 2004, Zeilberger was awarded the Euler Medal; the citation refers to him as "a champion of using computers and algorithms to do mathematics quickly and efficiently."

 

FeaTURED Speakers DURING FAll 2008

Prof. Joseph Diestel will speak on November 21st at 4:00 p.m. in Oliver Hall room 2084. The title of his talk is “Sums.” A departmental tea, preceding the talk, starts at 3:00.


Joe Diestel is a professor of mathematics at Kent State University.  Diestel received his Ph.D. from Catholic University under the direction of Victor Bodgan in 1968.  He has authored or coauthored five books and over 50 articles in the field of functional analysis and has advised more than 20 Ph.D. students. 


In his 40-year career Joe proved many major results relating to the geometry of infinite dimensional Banach spaces and is particularly well known for his expository writing.  His book Vector Measures (with Jerry Uhl) is an oft-cited and highly regarded exposition of the interplay between vector measure theory and Banach space theory.  His most recent book (coauthored with Jan Fourie and Johan Swart) entitled The Metric Theory of Tensor Products, revisits the famous Resume of Fields Medalist Alexander Grothendieck. 

For more information call: (804) 828-1301 or contact Prof. Kevin Beanland at kbeanland@vcu.edu