Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Ken Ono to discuss Ramanujan, Gauss and more
An accomplished researcher and mathematician, Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Ken Ono also has something that few of his colleagues share: Hollywood credentials.
Ono, the Thomas Jefferson Professor of Mathematics at the University of Virginia and the American Mathematical Society’s vice president, was also the associate producer of the 2016 film The Man Who Knew Infinity, starring Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel.
Binghamton University’s Psi Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa will welcome the award-winning scholar to a series of online talks March 11 to 12, accessible to the campus community through Zoom.
Ono earned his PhD from UCLA in 1993, and has received multiple awards for his research, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Packard Fellowship and a Sloan Fellowship. He received a Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering in 2000 and was named the National Science Foundation’s Distinguished Teaching Scholar in 2005. To date, he has published several monographs and more than 180 research and popular articles on number theory, combinatorics and algebra.
The events kick off from 2:50 to 3:50 p.m. Thursday, March 11, with a virtual undergraduate lecture, “What is the Riemann Hypothesis, and why does it matter?”
The Riemann hypothesis provides insights into the distribution of prime numbers, stating that the nontrivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function have a “real part” of one-half. A proof of the hypothesis would be world news and fetch a $1 million Millennium Prize. In this lecture, Ono will discuss the mathematical meaning of the Riemann hypothesis and why it matters. Along the way, he will tell tales of mysteries about prime numbers and highlight new advances.
Ono will then give a virtual colloquium talk on “Gauss’ Class Number Problem” from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. March 11.
In 1798, Gauss wrote Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, the first rigorous text in number theory. Perhaps the most important contribution in the work is Gauss’s theory of integral quadratic forms, which appears prominently in modern number theory.
Despite many modern developments in the field, Gauss’s first problem about quadratic forms — which asks for the complete list of quadratic form discriminants with class number h — hasn’t been optimally resolved due to the difficulty in effective computation. This lecture will tell the story of Gauss’s class number problem, and will highlight new work that offers new effective results by different (and also more elementary) means.
Events will conclude from 4 to 5 p.m. Friday, March 12, with a virtual public lecture on “Why does Ramanujan, ‘The Man Who Knew Infinity,’ matter?”
A self-trained two-time college dropout, Srinivasa Ramanujan left behind three notebooks filled with equations that mathematicians are still trying to figure out today. Ramanujan claimed that his ideas came to him as visions from an Indian goddess. Ono will discuss his lasting impact, which extends far beyond his legacy in science and mathematics.
Register online for the public lecture.