Hosting distinguished mathematicians from around the world

Myhill Lecture Series

CONTACT: GINO BIONDINI, BIONDINI@BUFFALO.EDU

Since 1988, the Myhill Lecture Series has featured special presentations and lectures by distinguished mathematicians from around the world. The series is named to honor John R. Myhill, Sr., who served as a UB Mathematics professor from 1966 to 1987. Myhill graduated from Harvard University in 1949. His dissertation is titled, A Semantically Complete Foundation for Logic and Mathematics. The UB Mathematics John R. Myhill Lecture Series is funded, in part, by the Darwin D. Martin endowment.

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Fall 2022 Myhill Lecture Series

Zoom image: The Myhill Lecture Series 2022, "The study of wave interactions: where beautiful mathematical ideas come together" will be delivered by Dr. Gigliola Staffilani, the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of Mathematics at MIT. Her research concerns harmonic analysis and partial differential equations, including the Korteweg–de Vries equation and Schrödinger equation. Join us for each lecture in the series, October 5, 6 and 7, from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m., 250 Mathematics Building, North Campus. The Myhill Lecture Series 2022, "The study of wave interactions: where beautiful mathematical ideas come together" will be delivered by Dr. Gigliola Staffilani, the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of Mathematics at MIT. Her research concerns harmonic analysis and partial differential equations, including the Korteweg–de Vries equation and Schrödinger equation. Join us for each lecture in the series, October 5, 6 and 7, from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m., 250 Mathematics Building, North Campus.

Learn more about the speakers

  • Gigliola Staffilani, 2022
    9/20/22
    The Myhill Lecture Series 2022, "The study of wave interactions: where beautiful mathematical ideas come together" will be delivered by Dr. Gigliola Staffilani, the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of Mathematics at MIT. Her research concerns harmonic analysis and partial differential equations, including the Korteweg–de Vries equation and Schrödinger equation. Join us for each lecture in the series, October 5, 6 and 7, from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m., 250 Mathematics Building, North Campus. 
  • Laura DeMarco, 2019
    9/14/22
    The Myhill Lecture Series 2019, "Complex dynamics and arithmetic geometry", will be delivered by Dr. Laura DeMarco, Henry S. Noyes Professor of Mathematics at Northwestern University. She earned her PhD in 2002 from Harvard. DeMarco's research is focused on the dynamics of polynomial or rational mappings on algebraic varieties, especially in dimension 1, with the primary goal of understanding notions of stability and bifurcation. Her recent work explores connections between dynamical properties of maps and the arithmetic geometry of the underlying varieties.
  • Mark Newman, 2018
    9/14/22
    Myhill Lecture Series 2018 by Dr. Mark Newman, Anatol Rapoport Distinguished University Professor of Physics, Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan.
  • Guoliang Yu, 2017
    9/14/22
    Join us for the 2017 Myhill Lecture Series by Guoliang Yu. His lecture series is entitled "Groups, Manifolds, and Higher Invariants of Elliptic Operators".
  • Gopal Prasad, 2016
    9/14/22
    Gopal Prasad, the Raul Bott Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan, delivered the prestigious Myhill Lectures on October 18-20, 2016. The lecture series, titled “Number Theory in Geometry,” drew an overflow crowd to Math 250 for the first talk, an introduction to the history of number theory in geometry.
  • Ciprian Manolescu, 2015
    9/14/22
    Ciprian Manolescu, Professor of Mathematics at UCLA, presented the Myhill Lecture Series 2014-15. This 3-part lecture series was held in April 2015, and included a reception in honor of Professor Manolescu after the first lecture. Manolescu earned his BA from Harvard in 2001. In 2002 he won the Morgan Prize for undergraduate research. He continued at Harvard, earning his PhD in 2004 under the supervision of Peter Kronheimer.
  • Percy A. Deift, 2014
    9/14/22
    Professor Percy A. Deift from Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, NYU, presented the Myhill Lecture Series 2013-14. This 3-part lecture series was held in the Fall, and included a reception in honor of Professor Deift after the first lecture.
  • Peter Sarnak, 2013
    9/14/22
    Professor Peter Sarnak from Princeton University presented the Myhill Lecture Series 2013. This 3-part lecture series was held in the Spring, and included a reception in honor of Professor Sarnak after the first lecture.

Victor Kac (MIT) November 1988

David Saltman (U. of Texas, Austin) February 1989

Cameron Gordon (U. of Texas, Austin) 
Combinatorial Methods in Knot Theory. March 1990

Armand Borel (IAS), 
L2-Harmonic Forms and Topological Invariants 
History of Full Reducibility and Invariants for SL2. November 1990

Leon A. Takhtajan (U. of Colorado) 
Geometry and Physics: Uniformization of Riemann Surfaces, Complex Geometry of Moduli Spaces and Two-Dimensional Quantum Gravity. November 1991

Ross Street (Macquarie Univ.) Categorical Structures in Mathematical Physics and Computing (and Vice Versa). April 1993

Peter Kronheimer (Oxford U. and IAS) March 1994

Stuart Antman (U. Maryland) 
Dissipation and Its Delights. March 1995

V. Kumar Murty (U. of Toronto) 
Fermat's Last Theorem, Congruences and L-Functions. April/May 1996

DeWitt Sumners (Florida State University, Tallahassee) 
The Topology of DNA. April 1997

Robert V. Kohn (NYU-Courant Institute) 
The Mathematics of Material Microstructure. April 1998

Gang Tian (MIT) 
Quantum Cohomology. March 1999

Hyman Bass (Univ. of Michigan) 
Tree Lattices
; Rigid Discrete Groups. April 2000

Andre Kirillov (Univ. of Pennsylvania) 
The Orbit Method in Representation, Theory of Lie Groups and Beyon. March 2001

Robert K. Lazarsfeld (Univ. of Michigan at Ann Arbor) 
Multiplier Ideals and their Applications in Algebraic Geometry. April 2002

Serguei Novikov (University of Maryland and Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics (Russia)
 Low Dimensional Topology in Analysis and Physics. April 2003

Christophe Margerin (Ecole Polytechnique, C.M.L.S.) 
The Ricci flow to geometrize 3-manifolds. April 2004

Vladimir E. Zakharov (Univ. of Arizona) 
Nonlinear waves, geometry, and integrable systems. April 2005  

William Arveson (University of California, Berkeley) Operator Theory and the K-Homology of Algebraic Varieties. April 2006 


Jonathan David Farley (University of the West Indies, Jamaica) 
The Many Lives of Lattice Theory. March 2007

Benson Farb (University of Chicago) 
Hidden Symmetry: 
The Torelli group: algebra, topology and dynamics. March 2008

Mark Kisin (University of Chicago) 
p-adic Hodge Theory. April 2009

George Papanicolaou (Stanford University) 
Imaging with Noise. March 2010

Benjamin Weiss (Hebrew University) 
The Isomorphism Problem in Ergodic Theory. April 2011

Mladen Bestvina (University of Utah) April 2012

Peter Sarnak (Princeton University and IAS) March 2013

Percy Deift (Courant Institute) 
Talks on Matrices. October 2013

Ciprian Manolescu (UCLA) 
Non-triangulable manifolds via gauge theory. April 2015

Gopal Prasad (University of Michigan) Number Theory in Geometry. October 2016

Guoliang Yu (Texas A & M University) Groups, Manifolds, and Higher Invariants of Elliptic Operators. September, 2017

Mark Newman (University of Michigan) Lecture 1: Epidemics, Erdos numbers, and the Internet: The mathematics of networks; Lecture 2: Randomized models of networks; Lecture 3: Phase transitions and belief propagation in sparse networks. October 2018.

Laura DeMarco (Northwestern University) Complex dynamics and arithmetic geometry, September, 2019.

Gigliola Staffilani (MIT) The study of wave interactions: where beautiful mathematical ideas come together, October, 2022.

Short bio: John R. Myhill, Sr.

John Myhill.

John R. Myhill, Sr. photograph courtesy of Paul Halmos

John R. Myhill, Sr. (11 August 1923 – 15 February 1987) was a British mathematician. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University under Willard Van Orman Quine in 1949. He was professor at SUNY Buffalo from 1966 until his death in 1987. He also taught at several other universities. His son, also named John Myhill, is a professor of linguistics in the English department of the University of Haifa in Israel.

Since 1988, the Myhill Lecture Series at UB has featured well over two dozen distinguished mathematicians from around the world.

Myhill's Mathematics

Wikipedia article on J.M.

J.M.'s isomorphism theorem 1955

J.M. and Anil Nerode 1958

J.M. invented Constructive Set Theory in 1975

Myhill's Music

Hiller: Computer Music Retrospective, CD, July 1990 
Lejaren Hiller, Charles Ames, John Myhill, Jan Williams

See more about J.M.'s property

Tsukuba exposition 1985: computer generated music Perspectives of New Music 
Automated Composition: An Installation at the 1985 International Exposition in Tsukuba, Japan

J.M.'s Early Efforts — wrote digitally on reel-to-reel tapes, which were then replayed analog.

 

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