Chelluri Lecture Series

The Chelluri Lecture Endowment was established in 2004 with support from family and friends of Thyagaraju (Raju) Chelluri. Each year, a distinguished mathematician will be invited to give the Chelluri Lecture.

The Chelluri Lecture series is offered in memory of Thyagaraju (Raju) Chelluri, who graduated magna cum laude from Cornell with a Bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1999. Raju was a brilliant student, a gifted scholar, and a wonderful human being who died on August 21, 2004 at the age of 26, shortly after completing all requirements for the Ph.D. in Mathematics at Rutgers University. He wrote a thesis called Equidistribution of the Roots of Quadratic Congruences under the supervision of H. Iwaniec. He was awarded a Ph.D. posthumously.

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Saul Teukolsky, Cornell University
Einstein's Equations, Black Holes, and Gravitational Waves

Gravitational wave detectors like LIGO are poised to begin detecting signals. One of the prime scientific goals is to detect waves from the coalescence and merger of black holes in binary systems. Confronting such signals with the predictions of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity will be the first real strong-field test of the theory. Until very recently, theorists were unable to calculate what the theory actually predicts. I will describe recent breakthroughs that have occurred in the numerical simulations. Mathematical notions of hyperbolicity have played an important role in these breakthroughs. I will explain these connections, and describe how things are now set up for an epic confrontation between theory and experiment. This talk will be accessible to undergraduates with no knowledge of general relativity. [view poster]

The lecture will take place in 251 Malott Hall at 4:25 PM. Following the lecture, a reception and musical performance will be held at the A.D. White House.

Past Lectures

Allan Greenleaf, University of Rochester: Cloaking Devices, Electromagnetic Wormholes, and Transformation Optics (2008)

The laws of physics can be formulated in ways that are independent of the choice of coordinate system. (Einstein's special and general theories of relativity are well known examples of this.) Starting a decade ago, this was promoted within the optics community as a way of coming up with theoretical blueprints for novel optical devices which affect light and other kinds of waves in ways not encountered in nature. Now, due to progress in material science, these designs have the potential to be physically realized. It turns out that mathematicians have been considering closely related issues for some time, but from another point of view. I will discuss both approaches and describe two of the most interesting examples of transformation optics to date: cloaking devices, which make objects appear to be empty space, and electromagnetic wormholes, which trick waves into behaving as though the topology of space has been changed. [view poster]

Kenneth Ribet, University of California at Berkeley: Recent Progress on Serre's Conjecture (2007)

The proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, completed a dozen years ago, relied on the modularity of elliptic curves, which the media described as a bridge between two different parts of mathematics. The new techniques that were forged in the 1990s have flourished in the last several years. One spectacular development, completed during the winter, was the proof by Khare, Wintenberger, Kisin and others of a conjecture about the modularity of Galois representations that was made by J-P. Serre in 1987. Serre's Conjecture has influenced a great deal of the research in number theory over the last 25 years, including Professor Ribet's work on the link between the Shimura-Taniyama Conjecture and Fermat's Last Theorem. Prof. Ribet will explain the origins of this conjecture, and some of its earliest history (which predates the precise formulation of the conjecture!) Finally, he will sketch one or two of the new ideas used in the recent proof of the conjecture.

Dan Goldston, San Jose State University: Are There Infinitely Many Twin Primes? (2006)

This work has had its share of media attention, and even generated a song on public television. There has been three stages to this publicity: the enjoyment of small-time public fame for proving the result, followed closely by the not-so-enjoyable publicity when the proof crashed and burned, and lastly the redemption following the strange emergence of a new proof. After Wiles this may seem like standard procedure in mathematics, but I would not recommend it as a model for others to follow.

Last modified:April 7, 2009