The major mathematical event of the year is the annual Bernard Lecture, supported by the department's Richard R. Bernard Endowment. The 2007 Bernard Lecture,

Preference Sets, Graphs, and Voting in Agreeable Societies,
was given by
Prof. Francis Edward Su of Harvey Mudd College.

The Lecture was at 8 p.m. on Sunday, September 30, in the C. Shaw Smith 900 Room of the Alvarez College Union.

Lecture Abstract: When mathematical objects have a social interpretation, the associated theorems have social applications. We give examples of situations where sets model preferences, and suggest extensions of classical theorems on convex sets which have applications to the analysis of voting in "agreeable" societies. When do majorities exist? How does the shape of the political spectrum influence the outcome? What does mathematics have to say about how people behave? No advanced background in mathematics is assumed. This talk also features research with undergraduates. 

2007 - Professor Francis Edward Su 

Harvey Mudd College ("Preference Sets, Graphs, and Voting in Agreeable Societies")    poster

2006 - Professor Jeffrey Lagarias 

University of Michigan ("Mathematical Crystals and Quasicrystals")    poster

2005 - Professor Ronald Graham 

University of California, San Diego ("Searching for the Shortest Network")    poster

2004 - Professor Georgia Benkart 

University of Wisconsin ("Ladies of the Ring: A Tale of Two Women and Their Mathematics")    poster

2003 - Professor Edward Scheinerman 

Johns Hopkins University ("Mathematics Through Games")    poster

2002 - Professor Underwood Dudley 

DePauw University ("Why Teach Mathematics?")    poster

2001 - Professor Emeritus Carl Pomerance 

University of Georgia & Bell Laboratories ("Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, Paul Erdos, and Me")

2000 - Professor Lenore Blum 

Carnegie Mellon University ("Complexity and Real Computation--Where Turing Meets Newton")

1999 - Dr. William R. Pulleyblank 

Director of Mathematical Sciences in IBM's Research Division and Director of the IBM Deep Computing Institute ("Duality and Mathematical Optimization")

1998 - Professor Maynard Thompson 

Indiana University ("Stratified Population Models and Applications in Ecology")

1997 - Professor David Bressoud 

Macalester College ("Alternating Sign Matrix Conjecture")

1996 - Professor Robert Bryant 

Duke University ("The Notions of Area and Volume and Geometry: From the Greeks to the Moderns")

1995 - Professor William Dunham 

Muhlenberg College ("A Tribute to Euler"), author of Journey Through Genius, The Mathematical Universe, and Euler: Master of Us All

1994 - Professor Robert Devaney

Boston University ("The Fractal Geometry of the Mandelbrot Set ")

1993 - Professor Brian White

Stanford University ("On Beyond Infinity")

1992 - Professor Victor Klee

The University of Washington, Seattle ("Some Unsolved Problems in Intuitive Geometry")