Professor Nancy Hingston will be giving a series of lectures at this year’s Women and Mathematics Program. The event, titled “Curves, Loops, and Words in Geometry,” which is jointly run by the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) and Princeton University, will be held on May 9-20, 2016, at the IAS campus in Princeton, NJ. The title and abstract of Professor Hingston’s lecture series is as follows:
Closed Geodesics on Surfaces
A light ray traveling on a surface traces out a geodesic path. The search for closed goedesics on surfaces goes back more than a hundred years, and has given rise to a beautiful interplay between geometry, analysis, and topology. We will introduce basic differential geometry of curves and surfaces in 3 dimensions, and some ideas that have been developed over the last century to prove the existence of closed geodesics. For example, every closed, convex surface has at least 3 simple closed geodesics.
The application deadline for the Women and Mathematics Program is February 19, 2016. The program is sponsored by the NSF and is open to undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral women in the field of mathematics. This is an intensive program which includes lectures, seminars, and panel discussions on a wide range of topics of interest to women mathematicians. For more information and an application, please go to the Women in Mathematics website.