MATHEMATICS COLLOQUIUM SERIES

by Vadim Olshevsky

We had a busy year in 2003-2004, with 13 speakers in the fall semester and 27 speakers in the spring. (The schedule and abstracts of the talks can be found on our Web site. On the Department's Web home page, http://www.math.uconn.edu/, click on the 'Seminars' link and then on 'Colloquium Schedule'.) In addition to the regular colloquium series and several presentations from job candidates, the Department launched three new special colloquium series.

1) Speakers in the "Major Prize Recipient" series: Alan Edelman (MIT, Householder Prize 1990), Madhu Sudan (MIT, Nevannlinna Prize 2003), Nassif Ghoussun (UBC & PIMS, Coxeter-James Prize 1990), Avi Wigderson (Princeton, Nevannlinna Prize 1994). It is worth mentioning that two of our speakers are recipients of the highly prestigious Rolf Nevanlinna award (and a third will be coming in Fall 2004). It is well known that there is no Nobel Prize in mathematics and that the two top international awards are the Fields medal and the Nevanlinna Prize.

2) We had six "cross-disciplinary colloquia," jointly sponsored with the department of Computer Science and Engineering. These drew much larger audiences than usual, with many graduate students from both departments in attendance. Included were mini-colloquia by Ion Mandoiu and Aggelos Kiayias (UConn CSE).

3) William Stein (Harvard) spoke on "The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture." This was the first in the "Clay Millennium Problems" series. (The Clay Mathematics Institute has designated a $7 million fund for the solution of this and six other open problems.)

The talks in 2003-04 covered a number of topics in diverse fundamental and applied areas, which

ranged from Abstract Algebra and Topology to Bioinformatics and Financial Mathematics. Despite a rather limited budget, the colloquium had an international flavor, and our speakers were not only from the US (including our own Yung-Sze Choi and Richard Bass), but also from Canada, France, New Zealand, Poland, and Russia. All in all, it was an enjoyable colloquium year for our faculty, visitors, post-docs and graduate students. Finally, the colloquium committee received substantial help and advice from a large number of faculty members, and this is a good opportunity to thank everybody for their feedback.