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

The 2013 Bernard Lecture, will be delivered in fall 2013 by

Professor Emeritus Larry Baggett,
University of Colorado Boulder.

Professor Baggett, Davidson College class of 1960, was the first blind student admitted to Davidson College, and the first blind doctoral student in mathematics at the University of Washington.  His new memior In the Dark on the Sunny Side: A Memoir of an Out-of-Sight Mathematician was published in 2012 by the MAA.

Previous Bernard Lectures:

2012 - Professor Paul Edelman 

Vanderbilt University ("Mathematics and the Law: The Apportionment of the House of Representatives")    more information

2011 - Professor Sue Whitesides 

University of Victoria ("At the crossroads of geometry, discrete mathematics, and algorithm design")    poster

2010 - Professor Manjul Bhargava 

Princeton University ("Linguistics, Poetry, and Mathematics")    poster

2009 - Professor Joseph Gallian  

University of Minnesota Duluth ("Using Mathematics to Create Symmetry Patterns")    poster

2008 - Professor Keith Devlin  

Stanford University ("When Mathematics Changed the World")    poster

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")