Verksamhet under våren 2001

Sällskapet håller tre möten under våren: tisdagen den 27 februari, onsdag den 4 april samt vårmötet tisdagen den 17 april.
Mötena börjar klockan 18.30 i sal C i Matematikhuset. Alla, även icke-medlemmar, är varmt välkomna! Före mötena, från klockan 18.15, serveras gratis förfriskningar. Efter varje möte inbjuds alla till en eftersits med mat och dryck till självkostnadspris.

Den 27 februari håller Jan-Erik Roos, Stockholm, föredraget

Perioder-En ny klass av tal

Perioder är en ny klass av tal som nyligen införts och studerats av Maxim Kontsevich och Don Zagier. Jag skall ge en elementär översikt av grunderna av denna fascinerande teori, som hänger ihop med många andra delar av matematiken.

Den 4 april håller Robin Johnson, Newcastle, föredraget

Breaking the waves

Föredraget kommer att handla om icke-linjär vågutbredning och solitoner.

Den 17 april håller Vaughan Jones, Berkeley, föredraget

Why not a knot?

Vaughan F. R. Jones was born on the 31:st of December 1952, at Gisborne, New Zealand. He did his prepatory and undergraduate work in Auckland N.Z. but left for Geneva to do his graduate work in 1974. First he did a stint at Ecole de Physique but eventually wrote a thesis in mathematics in 1979 under the guidance of the well-known topologist A.Haefliger. This was also the year in which he married (to Martha Myers, a marriage, which (so far) has produced three children, the youngest of whom - Alice, will together with her mother, join in the visit to Sweden). The next year he took up a Post-Doc position as a Hedrick at UCLA, and after a shorter interlude in Pennsylvania, he returned to California, as a professor of mathematics at UC Berkeley, where he has remained since 1985.

In 1990 Jones was awarded the Fields medal at the ICM at Kyoto. The ostensible reason was his discovery in 1984 of a new polynomial invariant for knots and links in 3-space. Knot theory is a rather established field, and his discovery came as a complete surprise to knot-topologists, who had been searching for new invariants for the better part of a century. Striking as such a discovery may have been, it was just a spin-off from discovering startling, and hitherto unsuspected, relationships between von Neumann algebras and geometric topology. At the heart of the matter lies Jones Index theorem, with repercussions, not only on the aforementioned knot-theory, but also tying together seemingly diverse fields like representations of Lie algebras, Quantum groups and Statistical mechanics. It is safe to claim that Jones work along with that of Connes has been instrumental in revitalizing the subject of von Neumann algebras giving it a much vaster scope, and making it a central part of Modern Mathematics.

In addition to the Fields medal he has enjoyed a variety of awards and distinctions, the complete list of which may be too tedious to list here. Suffices it to single out, among his fellowships in various prestigous societies like the Royal Society, the AASA and the National Academy of Sciences, the award of the Honorary vice Presidency for life of the International Guild of Knot Tyers, a position he has enjoyed since 1992.