Description
This talk will explain to a general audience how mathematicians imagine and study 3 dimensional spaces different from the familiar space we live in. We will hear about a discovery of the existence of new 3-dimensional spaces by Sawin and Wood that came about by applying ideas from probability and statistics. Without any mathematical background required, we will get a glimpse into cutting edge mathematics.
Melanie Matchett Wood is the William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University. Her work spans number theory, algebraic geometry, algebraic topology, and probability. At age sixteen, Melanie became the first female American to make the United States International Math Olympiad Team. She won two silver medals at the IMO, in1998 and 1999. In college at Duke University, she was the first American woman Putnam Fellow. Melanie completed her PhD at Princeton University, and was then a Szego Assistant Professor at Stanford University, a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Chancellor’s Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2021, Wood received the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award, the nation’s highest honor for early-career scientists and engineers, and in 2022 Wood received a MacArthur Fellowship.
