UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Alex Eskin, Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Mathematics at the University of Chicago, will present the 2024 Russell Marker Lectures in the Mathematical Sciences on March 11, 12, 13 and 14 on the Penn State University Park campus. The free public lectures are sponsored by the Penn State Eberly College of Science.
The series includes a public lecture intended for a general mathematical audience, titled “Polygonal Billiards and Dynamics on Moduli Spaces,” which will be held at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, March 11, in 114 McAllister Building.
Eskin will also give three specialized lectures. The first is titled “Random Dynamics, SL(2,R) Actions and Measure Rigidity,” and will be held at 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 12. The second lecture is titled “Generalized u-Gibbs States, Normal Forms, Holonomies and Linearization” and will be held at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 13. Finally, the third lecture, titled “Anosov Maps on the 3-torus and the QNI Condition,” will be held at 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 14. All the lectures will be held in 114 McAllister Building.
Eskin is a mathematician who is broadly interested in dynamical systems and geometric group theory. Eskin earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a doctoral degree in mathematics at Princeton University in 1993. He joined the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1999.
Eskin’s honors and awards include receiving the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2020 for revolutionary discoveries in the dynamics and geometry of moduli spaces of Abelian differentials, and the Clay Research Award in 2017 for his contribution to the establishment of quasi-isometric rigidity of solvable groups. He became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012 and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2015. Eskin gave invited talks at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1998 and 2010.
The Marker lectures were established in 1984 through a gift from Russell Earl Marker, professor emeritus of chemistry at Penn State, whose pioneering synthetic methods revolutionized the steroid-hormone industry and opened the door to the current era of hormone therapies, including the birth control pill. The Marker endowment allows the Penn State Eberly College of Science to present annual Marker lectures in astronomy and astrophysics, the chemical sciences, evolutionary biology, genetic engineering, the mathematical sciences and physics.
For more information about the lectures or for access assistance, contact Rachel Weaver at (814) 865-4350 or rmw5646@psu.edu.