The AMS Einstein Lectures

The 2024 Einstein Public Lecture in Mathematics, The Data Revolution was given by Talitha Washington, Clark Atlanta University and Atlanta University Center, at the 2024 Spring Eastern Sectional Meeting at Howard University, Washington, DC, on April 6, 2024.

Talitha Washington is a featured mathematician on the American Mathematical Society's poster, Mathematically Gifted And Black.

Washington Delivers 2024 Einstein Public Lecture
by Elaine Beebe
April 17, 2024

Two data points stood out among the figures presented by Talitha Washington during the AMS Einstein Public Lecture, April 6 at Howard University.

The first was that the United States will be shorthanded three million workers in STEM fields by 2030. The second: African Americans comprise 12 percent of the US population but only three percent of data analytics professionals.

Those numbers are a problem, Washington told the audience. And as a mathematician, I like to solve problems.

Read more…

The 2023 Einstein Public Lecture in Mathematics was given by Nathaniel Whitaker, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, at the Spring Central Sectional Meeting at the University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, April 15-16, 2023. The title of the lecture was From Segregation to Research Mathematician.

This lecture was not recorded. Read the AMS Feature Story "Whitaker Delivers Einstein Public Lecture at University of Cincinnati"

This lecture was cancelled, as part of the cancellation of the 2022 Spring Southeastern Sectional Meeting.

The 2021 Einstein Public Lecture in Mathematics was delivered virtually on Saturday, March 20, 2021, by Professor Abba Gumel of Arizona State University. The title of his lecture was Mathematics of Infectious Diseases.

Abba Gumel is the Foundation Professor of Mathematics at the School of Mathematical and Statistical Science, Arizona State University. He received his PhD in Mathematics from Brunel University, England, in 1994, and has been Professor of Mathematics at the University of Manitoba, Canada (1999-2014).

The 2019 Einstein Lecture was held in the Kennedy Theatre at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI. The title of his lecture was On the Arithmetic of Curves.

Barry Mazur is Gerhard Gade University Professor at Harvard University. Winner of many awards and prizes, including the National Medal of Science, Mazur has done outstanding work in many areas of mathematics. His work provided a foundation for the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem and is known for being able to communicate those results to non-mathematicians and to relish doing so.

The 2018 Einstein Lecture was held in the Blackman Auditorium, Ell Hall, at Northeastern University, Boston, MA, on April 21, 2018 at 5:15 pm. The title of his lecture was Imagination and Knowledge.

Edward Frenkel is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, which he joined in 1997 after being on the faculty at Harvard University. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and the winner of the Hermann Weyl Prize in mathematical physics. Frenkel's latest book "Love and Math" was a New York Times bestseller, has been named one of the Best Books of the year by both Amazon and iBooks, and won the Euler Book Prize from the Mathematical Association of America.

April 1, 2017 at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana
Spring Central Sectional Meeting
Modern Scratch Paper: Graphical Explorations in Geometry and Dynamics

Over the years I've made a number of graphical user interfaces whose purpose is to help understand problems in geometry and dynamics. These interfaces let you discover patterns and organize information in a way that would be practically impossible using pencil and paper. Sometimes they also facilitate computational proofs that are a kind of deal with the devil: they give a rigorous proof for an appealing result without offering conventional insight into why the result is true. In this talk I will show some of my graphical user interfaces and explain the mathematics behind them.

March 5, 2016 at the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia
Spring Southeastern Sectional Meeting
Fun with Fonts: Mathematical Typography

Over the past decade, my father and I have designed several typefaces based on mathematical theorems and open problems. These typefaces expose the general public in a unique way to intriguing results and hard problems in hinged dissections, geometric tours, origami design, computer-aided glass design, physical simulation, protein folding, juggling, and card shuffling.

March 7, 2015 at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.
Spring Eastern Sectional Meeting
Cancer by the Numbers

The mathematical sciences have contributed substantially to our understanding of the way cancer evolves. Cancer is a disease of the genome, so the focus of this lecture will be on mutations in DNA and what they tell us about tumor evolution. We will discuss "tumor heterogeneity," the DNA sequence variation observed between tumors and within them, and what this tells us about progression, treatment, and relapse.

Oct 25, 2014 at San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California
Fall Western Section Meeting
Mathematics, Common Sense, and Good Luck

Jim Simons recounts his journey from childhood math enthusiast to successful mathematician and hedge fund manager, emphasizing the importance of originality, persistence, and good luck. He also discusses how his philanthropic foundation supports math education and scientific research, illustrating his belief in the power of collaboration and beauty as guiding principles.

Oct 19, 2013 at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri
Fall Central Section Meeting
Bursts, Cascades, and Hot Spots: A Glimpse of Some On-Line Social Phenomena at Global Scales

As an increasing amount of social interaction moves on-line, it becomes possible to study phenomena that were once essentially invisible: how our social networks are organized, how groups of people come together and attract new members, and how information spreads through society. With computational and mathematical ideas, we can begin to map the rich social landscape that emerges, filled with "hot spots" of collective attention, and behaviors that cascade through our networks of social connections.

Mar 17, 2012 at George Washington University, Washington, D.C.
Spring Eastern Section Meeting
Cloaking: Science Meets Science-Fiction

Can one make objects invisible? This has been a subject of human fascination for millennia in Greek mythology, movies, science fiction etc. including the legend of Perseus versus Medusa and the more recent The Invisible Man, The Invisible Woman, Star Trek and Harry Potter, among many others. In the last decade or so there has been several scientific proposals to achieve invisibility. We will introduce some of these in a non-technical fashion concentrating in the so-called "transformation optics" that have received the most attention in the scientific literature.

Oct 9, 2010 at University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California
Fall Western Section Meeting
The Cosmic Distance Ladder

How do we know the distances from the earth to the sun and moon, from the sun to the other planets, and from the sun to other stars and distant galaxies? Clearly we cannot measure these directly. Nevertheless there are many indirect methods of measurement, combined with basic high-school mathematics, which can allow one to get quite convincing and accurate results without the need for advanced technology (for instance, even the ancient Greeks could compute the distances from the earth to the sun and moon to moderate accuracy). These methods rely on climbing a "cosmic distance ladder," using measurements of nearby distances to then deduce estimates on distances slightly further away; we shall discuss several of the rungs in this ladder in this lecture.

Apr 4, 2009 at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina
Spring Southeastern Section Meeting
Reading DNA sequences: Twenty-first century technology with eighteenth century mathematics

With the discovery of the double helix in 1953, it became clear that determining DNA sequence was an important goal. The Sanger method was invented in 1975 and by 2001 renements of that method allowed sequencing of the human genome. Today an exciting new generation of sequencing methods is rapidly increasing the speed of DNA sequencing. This lecture will consider the mathematical and computational challenges of sequencing DNA.

Oct 4, 2008 at the University of British Columbia and the Pacific Institute of Mathematical Sciences (PIMS)
2008 Fall Western Section Meeting

This lecture was cancelled.

Please see: Birds and Frogs, Notices February 2009

Oct 6, 2007 at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, College Avenue Campus, New Brunswick, New Jersey
Fall Eastern Section Meeting
Spacetime Conformal Geometry, and a New Extended Cosmology

Sir Roger Penrose will speak about a new view of the universe that unites three of the most puzzling aspects of cosmology: dark energy, dark matter, and the extreme specialness of the Big Bang

Apr 29, 2006 at San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California
Spring Western Section Meeting
The Nature of Roughness in Mathematics, Science, and Art

Professor Mandelbrot is world famous for his work on fractal geometry and chaos theory. He is universally acknowledged as the "father of fractals," a subject that has its roots in the work of Weierstrass, Cantor, Klein, and Poincaré. Professor Mandelbrot has proposed fractal models for the study of coastlines, clouds, lungs, trees, arteries, etc.

Oct 21, 2005 at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska
Fall Central Section Meeting
The Nature of Space

Press releases and reviews:

• Notices article - Sir Michael Atiyah's Einstein Lecture: "The Nature of Space" by G. W. Johnson and Mark E. Walker
• News article - First Einstein Public Lecture in Mathematics