Can Computers Be Mathematicians?
Fields medalist and 2015 Joseph Priestley Award recipient Timothy Gowers. Photo by Mariana Cook.
Fields medalist Timothy Gowers will present the Joseph Priestley Award Lecture
Author, scholar and Fields Medal recipient Timothy Gowers, a professor at the University of Cambridge, will present the 63rd annual Joseph Priestley Award Lecture on Thursday, March 26, at 7 p.m. in the Stern Center Great Room. His lecture, “Can Computers Be Mathematicians?” is free and open to the public.
Gowers, who contends that computers will eventually be better at mathematics than humans, will speak on the nature of solving mathematical problems. He currently holds the Rouse Ball Professorship of Mathematics at Cambridge and is a Royal Society Research Professor. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1998 for his work in Banach space theory and combinatorics. Gowers is the author of Mathematics, A Very Short Introduction and is the main editor of The Princeton Companion to Mathematics, for which he won the Euler Book Prize from the Mathematical Association of America in 2011.
The Priestley Award is presented by Dickinson to a distinguished scientist whose work has contributed to the welfare of humanity and to the understanding of science and the world. It is named in memory of Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen. Gowers, this year’s honoree, joins previous Priestley Award recipients, including Nobel laureates in chemistry, physics and medicine and renowned scientists such as Carl Sagan, James Hansen, Joan Seitz and George Whitesides.
The event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and Student Senate. It is co-sponsored by the departments of mathematics & computer science, biology, chemistry, earth sciences, environmental studies, psychology and physics & astronomy.
Audio and video of past Clarke Forum events are available through Clarke Forum podcasts. Podcasts of numerous college speakers as well as course podcasts also are available via Dickinson's iTunes U channel.
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Published March 17, 2015