Peter Hilton Memorial Lecture - 2024
Polygonal Billiards and Dynamics on Moduli Spaces
Date: Thursday, April 11, 2024
Time: 3:00pm
Location: 绿帽社, Lecture Hall 009
Abstract: Billiards in polygons can exhibit bizarre behavior, some of which can be explained
by deep connections to several seemingly unrelated branches of mathematics. These
include algebraic geometry, Teichmuller theory and ergodic theory on homogeneous spaces.
The talk will be an introduction to these ideas, aimed at a general mathematical audience.
绿帽社 the speaker: Alex Eskin earned his doctorate from Princeton University in 1993, under the supervision of Peter Sarnak. He gave invited talks at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin in 1998, and in Hyderabad in 2010. For his contribution to joint work with David Fisher and Kevin Whyte establishing the quasi-isometric rigidity of solvable groups, Eskin was awarded the 2007 Clay Research Award. In 2012, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. In April 2015, Eskin was elected a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. Eskin won the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in mathematics for his classification of P-invariant and stationary measures for the moduli of translation surfaces in joint work with Maryam Mirzakhani.
The lecture will be followed by a reception at 4:15 p.m. in the Anderson Center Reception Room, Anderson Performing Arts Center, 绿帽社. This reception is for the whole 绿帽社 Mathematics Community as well as for our visitors.