Guest Lectures
The regular program activities are supplemented by diverse weekly lectures by faculty preceptors, Mentors, and guests of the program. These lectures introduce participants to related scientific fields and include discussions of career development and the ethics and philosophy of science; relationship between pure and applied science; and career options.
Guest Lectures in 2020
| July 10 | Diana Davis | (Swarthmore College) | Billiards on Regular Polygons |
| July 16 | Agnes Beaudry | (University of Colorado in Boulder) | Ants on Pants |
| July 17 | Matthew Baker | (Georgia Institute of Technology) | How Quadratic Reciprocity is Like Dealing Cards |
| July 24 | Vicky Neale | (Balliol College at the University of Oxford) | Waring's Problem |
| July 31 | Helen Grundman | (Bryn Mawr College & Brown University) | Joy & Happiness in Mathematics |
| August 7 | Steven J Miller | (Williams College) | The German Tank Problem: Math/Stats at War |
Guest Lectures 2019
| July 9 | Keith Conrad | (University of Connecticut) | The Biggest Known Prime |
| July 16 | Jeremy Booher | (University of Arizona) | Brussels Sprouts and the Euler Characteristic |
| July 26 | Ila Varma | (UC San Diego/University of Toronto) | Binary Quadratic Forms and the Conjectures of Gauss |
| July 27 | Julia Mundy | (Harvard University) | Designing New Quantum Materials at the Atomic-scale |
| July 27 | David Jao | (University of Waterloo) | How to Turn Pure Math into Applied Math: My Quest for the Perfect Application |
| July 27 | David R.H. Miller | (Google) | Natural Language Understanding, Deep Learning, and the BERT Revolution |
| July 28 | Alex Lee | (Northwestern University) | Perspectives on Law and Mathematics |
| July 29 | Glen Whitney | (Harvard) | Towers of Life |
| August 2 | Ryan McDermott | (Cornell University) | An Introduction to Bernoulli Percolation |
Julia Mundy's talk at the PROMYS 30th Anniversary Celebration July 26-28, 2019
Guest Lectures 2018
| July 6 | Paul Gunnells | (University of Massachusetts Amherst) | Generalized Catalan Numbers |
| July 25 | Philip Engel | (Harvard/University of Georgia) | Tilings and Counting |
| August 1 | Lila Greco | (Cornell University) | Paradoxes in Probability |
| August 5 | Joshua Greene | (Weiss Asset Management) | Checker Stacks and Related Musings |
Phil Engel delivering a guest lecture at PROMYS 2018
Lila Greco delivering a guest lecture in 2018
Guest Lectures 2017
| July 5 | Daniel Jerison | (Cornell University) | How many times to shuffle a deck of cards? |
| July 26 | Erick Knight | (University of Toronto) | The Emperor and his Money |
| August 5 | Jonathan Hanke | (Goldman Sachs) | What's so special about eight dimensions anyway? |
Erick Knight giving his guest lecture
Jonathan Hanke's guest lecture
Students asking Erick Knight questions after his guest lecture
Guest Lectures 2016
| July 6 | Keith Conrad | (University of Connecticut) | Impossibility by modular arithmetic |
| July 14 | Tadashi Tokieda | (Stanford University/University of Cambridge) | Applying physics to mathematics |
|
July 25 August 2 |
Rob Gross Ila Varma |
(Boston College) (Harvard and Columbia Universities) |
Summing It Up: Amazon Rank 20,948 Hasse’s local-global principle |
| August 6 | Lionel Levine | (Cornell University) | The future of prediction |
Ila Varma giving her guest lecture at PROMYS 2016
Tadashi Tokieda speaking with students and counselors after giving his talk on applying physics to mathematics
Lionel Levine speaks with participants and alumni after giving his guest lecture in August 2016
Guest Lectures 2015
| July 8 | Keith Conrad | (University of Connecticut) | Continued Fractions |
| July 29 | Moon Duchin | (Tufts University) | Can you hear the shape of a drum? |
| August 2 | Melody Chan | (Brown University) | Triangles |
Guest Lectures 2014
| July 3 | Dierk Schleicher | (Jacobs University, Bremen) | On useful and useless mathematics: the Mandelbrot set and Newton’s root-finding method |
| July11 | Keith Conrad | (University of Connecticut) | Decimal Expansions and Number Theory |
| July 23 | David R. H. Miller | (Google, Inc.) | The Mathematics of Google Search |
| July 25 | Po-Shen Loh | (Carnegie Mellon University) | IMO meets research |
| July 30 | Margaret Beck | (Boston University) | Understanding solutions of equations that we can’t actually solve |
|
August 2 |
Solomon Hsiang | (University of California, Berkeley) | Quantifying the Influence of Climate on Human Conflict |
Guest Lectures 2013
(Lectures on July 5-7 were part of the PROMYS 25th Summer Celebration)
|
July 5 |
Dustin Clausen | (MIT) | Stereographic projection and number theory |
| July 5 | David Speyer | (University of Michigan) | Seeing (yes, visually!) why we can't solve degree five equations |
| July 5 | Bryden Cais | (University of Arizona) | Cohen--Lenstra heuristics for class groups of quadratic fields |
| July 6 | Keith Conrad | (University of Connecticut) | Number Theory and Music |
| July 6 | Lionel Levine | (Cornell University) | How to make the most of a shared meal: plan the last bite first |
| July 6 | David Frohard-Lane | Predictive Modeling in Sportsbetting | |
| July 6 | Jenny Hoffman | (Harvard University) | Topology: the newest revolution in materials physics |
| July 7 | Li-Mei Lim | (Brown University) | Circle Inversion and Steiner's Porism |
| July 12 | Robyn Allen | (Arcmetra, Inc.) | Your life is a startup: Entrepreneurship as preparation for academia, industry and other pursuits |
| July 22 | David Conlon | (Oxford University) | Binomial coefficients, the prime number theorem and Bertrand's postulate |
| July 26 | Ben Elias | (MIT) | Categorification |
| August 2 | Farshid Hajir | (University of Massachusetts Amherst) | What are error-correcting codes? |
Guest Lectures 2012
| July 13 | Ben Harris | (Louisiana State University) | Distributions on the Unit Circle |
| July 25 | Stephen Wolfram | (Wolfram Research) | Doing and Discovering Math with Computers |
|
July 27 July 27 |
Michael King David Miller |
(Bowdoin) (Google) |
The Laurent Phenomenon On Integers, Intervals, and the Internet |
| August 1 | Amanda Beeson | (University of Rochester) | Euler's Pentagonal Number Theorem |
| August 3 | Ila Varma | (Princeton) | Hasse's Local-Global Principle |
Guest Lectures 2011
| July 5 | David Miller | (Google) | Statistical Interference and Modeling the Unseen: How Bayesian statistics powers Google's voice search and machine translation technology |
| July 13 | Dan Klain | (University of Massachusetts at Lowell) | Angle sums for polyhedra |
| July 27 | Michael King | (Bowdoin College) | Triangulations of the n-gon and Root Systems |
| July 29 | Jonathan Hanke | (University of Georgia) | Random Numbers and the Zeta Function |
| August 2 | Bryden Cais | (University of Arizona) | Every integer is the sum of four squares |
Guest Lectures 2010
| July 2 | Keith Conrad | (University of Connecticut) | Polynomial Roots on a Circle |
| July 9 | Andrew Lo | (MIT) | Finance Made Difficult: Mathematics, Money, and Financial Crises |
| July 20 | Amanda Beeson | (Williams College and University of Rochester) | Did Escher Know What an Elliptic Curve Is? |
| July 23 | Henry Cohn | (Microsoft Research Institute) | How to Break Cryptosystems by Finding Small Solutions of Equations |
| July 27 | Kirsten Wickelgren | (Harvard University) | Fixed Point Theorems and Solving Equations |
| July 27 | Paul Gunnells | (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) | Expander Graphs |
Guest Lectures 2009
| July 7 | David Miller | (Cambridge Googleplex) | The Mathematics of Google Search |
| July 14 | Farshid Hajir | (University of Massachusetts Amherst) | The ABC Conjecture |
| July 28 | Steven Miller | (Williams) | Heuristics and Ballpark Estimates |
| July 30 | Keith Conrad | (University of Connecticut) | Pythagorean Triples |
Guest Lectures 2008
| July 8 | Keith Conrad | (University of Connecticut) | Applications of Pell’s Equations |
| July 11 | Paul Gunnells | (University of Massachusetts Amherst) | Configuration Spaces |
| July 25 | Steven J. Miller | (Williams) | The Pythagorean Won-Loss Formula in Baseball |
| August 1 | Farshid Hajir | (University of Massachusetts Amherst) | Asymptotically Good Families of Graphs |
Guest Lectures 2007
| July 6 | Jon Hanke | (Duke University) | Geometry of Affine and Projective Space |
| July 13 | Keith Conrad | (University of Connecticut) | A Universal Divisibility Test |
| July 16 | Steven Miller | (Brown) | Benford’s Law: From Number Theory to the IRS |
| July 27 | David Jao | (University of Waterloo) | Elliptic Curve Cryptography |
| August 3 | Keith Conrad | (University of Connecticut) | Counting in Z[√d] |
| August 6 | Ander Steele | Carmichael Numbers in Number Rings |
Guest Lectures 2006
| July 26 | Matthew Szudzik | (Wolfram Research) | Antor's Absurd Question |
| July 27 | Jon Hanke | (Duke University) | Exact Formulas for Representing Numbers by a Quadratic Form |
Guest Lectures 2005
| July 15 | Matthew Szudzik | (Wolfram Research) | Who was Laszlo Kalmar and what were his functions? |
| July 18 | Curt Monash | (Monash Information Services) | The Power of Maybe |
| July 29 | Kiran Kedlaya | (MIT) | Elliptic Curves |
| August 2 | Cleve Moler | (The MathWorks, Inc.) | The Evolution of MATLAB |
| August 4 | Keith Conrad | (University of Connecticut) | Check Digits |
Guest Lectures 2004
| July 16 | Robert Pollack | (Boston University) | Unique Factorization and Diophantine Equations |
| July 19 | Ira Gessel | (Brandeis University) | The Chung-Feller theorem |
| July 21 | Matthew Szudzik | (Wolfram Research) | Exploring Recursively Defined Sequences |
| August 2 | David Jao | (Microsoft Research) | Codebreaking |
| August 4 | Keith Conrad | (University of Connecticut) | Quaternions |
| August 6 | Paul Gunnells | (UMass Amherst) | Diophantine Equations in Polynomials |
Guest Lectures 2003
| August 3 | Keith Conrad | (UC San Diego) | The End of Continued Fractions |
| August 5 | Henry Cohn | (Microsoft Research) | Self-reference |
Guest Lectures 2002
| July 17 | David Miller | (Aventis Pharmaceuticals) | Bioinformatics and Gene Expression Analysis |
| July 19 | Henry Cohn | (Microsoft Research) | Sphere Packing |
| July 31 | Jonathan Lubin | (Brown University) | p-adic Numbers |
| August 2 | Paul Gunnells | (UMass Amherst) | Continued Fractions and Hyperbolic Geometry |
| August 9 | Keith Conrad | (UC San Diego) | Sums of Three Squares |
Guest Lectures 2001
| July 27 | David Jao | (Harvard University) | 41 Primes in a Row |
| August 3 | Dev Sinha | (University of Oregon) | Some Knotty Problems |