- Speaker
-
Kevin Buzzard, Ph.D.Professor of Pure Mathematics Department of Mathematics - Faculty of Natural Sciences, Imperial College London
Presidential Lectures are a series of free public colloquia spotlighting groundbreaking research across four themes: neuroscience and autism science, physics, biology, and mathematics and computer science. These curated, high-level scientific talks feature leading scientists and mathematicians and are designed to foster discussion and drive discovery within the New York City research community. We invite those interested in these topics to join us for this weekly lecture series.
Over the last 2,500 years, the way we do mathematics has changed surprisingly little. In Euclid’s Elements, we see lemmas, theorems and proofs, with material building on earlier work and presented in essentially the same style as a modern mathematics textbook. As a consequence of this inertia, humanity now possesses an extraordinary body of mathematical knowledge. This knowledge is mostly correct, sometimes poorly presented and poorly referenced, is sometimes only “known to the experts,” contains plenty of errors (some serious), and gives rise to farcical situations such as the ABC conjecture, an important conjecture with a published proof in a reputable journal that many do not believe is correct.
Is there a better way to do this? In this Presidential Lecture, Kevin Buzzard will discuss the future of mathematics and the role computers can play in proof development through tools such as Lean.
About the Speaker
Buzzard is a professor of pure mathematics at Imperial College London and a maintainer of the mathematics library of the functional programming language Lean. In recent years, he has given talks all over the world about using interactive theorem provers to do mathematics, including a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematics in 2022. He is a recipient of the London Mathematical Society’s Whitehead Prize and Senior Berwick Prize and won Imperial College’s President’s Medal for Teaching Innovation in 2020.