The Evans Lectures are named for Evan William Evans, the first professor appointed at Cornell, a mathematician and college friend of A. D. White. The lectures are intended for an audience of mathematics faculty and graduate students, to bring them together to share in the excitement of mathematical research. The Evans Lectures are made possible through the generosity of an anonymous donor.
UPCOMING LECTURES
March 22nd, 2022 and March 23rd, 2022
Speaker: Persi Diaconis, Stanford University
Professor Diaconis will be presenting a different lecture each day. Both will be held in-person in Malott Hall 253 from 4:30 - 5:30 p.m.
A reception will be held before each lecture at 4:00 in 532 Malott Hall.
If you would like to Join the Zoom Meeting go to:
https://cornell.zoom.us/j/98173617626?pwd=L2V1SDByWDNsVlNiNGp6YXk1SmRBZz09
If you were unable to attend the in-person lectures, a link to the lecture recordings are provided under each abstract.
Lecture 1, March 22nd
Title: The of Making a Mess
Abstract: I will study some of the most popular ways of shuffling cards; riffle shuffles, overhand shuffles and 'smushing". For each, sharp mathematical analysis is available. These have some surprises. For example, about seven ordinary riffle shuffles are necessary and suffice to mix up 52 cards, but it takes about 10,000 overhand shuffles (even though the two schemes have the 'same amount of randomness'/ shuffle). Analysis of 'smushing' needs different kinds of more continuous mathematics. A second theme of the lecture is to introduce the tool of 'coupling'. This has been developed in the probability community and seems unknown in the rest of mathematics. It's broadly useful (working for all three shuffles and Markov chains quite generally). I will try to explain all this 'in English' to a general mathematical audience.
Lecture I Recording
Lecture II, March 23rd
Title: Shuffling cards, a higher mathematical view
Abstract: Careful analysis of shuffling can call on tools from many parts of mathematics. It also has applications there. Of course combinatorics, probability and analysis occur, but also lie theory (the shuffle algebra is a close cousin of the Free Lie algebra), Hopf algebras (shuffles give Hodge decompositions of Hochschild homology) and multiple zeta values. Again, I will try to explain all of this 'in English' to a general mathematical audience.
Lecture II Recording
If you need accommodations, please contact Heather Peterson.
PREVIOUS LECTURES IN THE SERIES
- Fernando Marques, Princeton University (November 2016)
Lecture I: Min-Max theory for the area functional - a panorama
Lecture II: The space of Weyl's Law and Morse Index Estimates - Karin Melnick, University of Maryland (January 2013)
Lecture I: A rigidity theorem in conformal geometry and beyond
Lecture II: Normal forms for conformal Lorentzian vector fields - Emmanuel Breuillard, Université Paris-Sud (October 2010)
Lecture I: The ubiquity of free groups
Lecture II: From free subgroups to random walks and spectral gaps - Christopher Skinner, Princeton University (October 2009)
Special Values of L-Functions and Modular Forms
Lecture I: The saga of 691; Lecture II: Special value formulas
About Evans
Evan William Evans was born in 1827 in Wales. His family emigrated to America soon after his birth. In 1851 he graduated from Yale University, where he made the acquaintance of Andrew Dickson White. After graduating from Yale he served as Instructor in at Yale. He later became Professor at Marietta College in Ohio. In February 1867, White recruited Evans to head Cornell's Department of and Engineering. He was among the first group of faculty at Cornell. He held the post until a few months before his death in 1874.
James Oliver (of Oliver Club fame and himself a student of Benjamin Pierce at Harvard) described Evans as
“a man of few words but of remarkably sound and independent judgement that carried great weight in the faculty councils, and as an acute and thorough student, a philosophical and original thinker, a firm and loyal friend… Characteristic of his instruction or policy were: the remarkable power of concentration with which he would follow others’ work without using his eyes, his uniform preference for oral above written examinations, and his habit of taking a calculus class over the same ground with two successive authors for the sake of the cross-light”
Evans was also a scholar of Cymric literature and philology and has been described in this area as “having no superior in the United States.” He wrote treatises on “the oil and mineral region of southeastern Ohio” and “Primary elements of plane and solid geometry” and an article titled “On the path and velocity of the Guernsey county meteor of May 1st.”
Remarkably enough, the name of Evan William Evans is present to this day somewhere in Malott Hall (with a slightly different spelling)!