'Prime Time Math: Little Green Men, Locust Hordes, and Cybersecurity'

Denison University and the Gordon Lecture Series welcomes W.M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Pomona College Stephan Ramon Garcia. He is the author of six books and over 120 research articles in operator theory, complex analysis, matrix analysis, number theory, discrete geometry, combinatorics, and other fields. This includes dozens of papers published with students, many of whom have gone on to top graduate programs. He has served on the editorial boards of the Proceedings of the AMS, Notices of the AMS, Involve, and The American Mathematical Monthly. He has received five NSF research grants as principal investigator and six teaching awards from three different institutions. He is a Fellow of the AMS and the inaugural winner of the AMS Dolciani Prize for Excellence in Research.

Although the prime numbers are the building blocks of arithmetic, they still hold many mysteries. Some questions that were familiar to Euclid and the ancient Greeks remain unanswered. How did several undergraduates help discover intriguing new phenomena in the large-scale behavior of the primes? What did they find? What do prime numbers have to do with insect swarms, cybersecurity, and the search for alien life? Come to this talk to find out! No knowledge of mathematics beyond addition and multiplication is required.