John Stillwell, University of San Francisco
Department of Mathematics, West Chester University
Time: 3:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Place: UNA 161, West Chester University
Information: mfisher@wcupa.edu or sgupta@wcupa.edu
In the mid-17th century, Leibniz dreamed of a "calculus ratiocinator" that would settle all disputes in logic by combinatorial computation. But little happened until the development of set theory and symbolic logic in the 19th century, and the startling discovery of Godel incompleteness in 1930. This led to the search for natural theorems not provable by finitary methods--a search that turned up some remarkable theorems of combinations in the 1970s and 1980s. Today, with the assistance of some eminent mathematicians, logic and combinatorics seem on the brink of living happily ever after.
John Stillwell taught at Monash University in Melbourne from 1970 to 2001 before taking his present position at the University of San Francisco, in 2002. He is known for his books on a wide range of mathematical topics, among them Mathematics and Its History (Springer 2002).