The annual “Pittsburgh Mathematical Horizons” Public Lecture Series is back for its second year with another Fields medal laureate: June Huh, who also won MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.
The Princeton professor will speak at 3:30 p.m. April 17 at 121 David Lawrence Hall. The lecture series, made possible by funding from the Benter Foundation, is designed to feature speakers who can present a topic in modern mathematics of interest to research mathematicians, but at the same time make it accessible to the science-interested public in Pittsburgh and its surroundings.
Huh’s talk will focus on “Projection areas of 4-dimensional shapes.” The lecture description says:
“Consider a convex body in 4-dimensional space — perhaps an ellipsoid or a polytope. When we project the convex body onto the six coordinate planes, we obtain six planar shadows whose areas we can measure. This leads to a deceptively simple question: which six numbers can arise as these projection areas?
“Behind this concrete geometric problem lies a web of deep mathematics connecting Minkowski’s classical work on the isoperimetric problem to recent developments in algebraic geometry. I will trace the path to the answer, revealing the rich mathematical landscape that emerges from this seemingly elementary question.”
The lecture series is organized by Ivan Yotov, Carl Wang-Erickson and Armin Schikorra, all faculty in the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences’ Department of Mathematics.
See last year’s lecture from James Maynard on the math department’s website.