Robert Macpherson To Lecture On Nature Of Proof

“On the Nature of Proof” is the title of a lecture to be delivered by mathematician Robert MacPherson on January 21 at 4:30 p.m. in Wolfensohn Hall on the campus of the Institute for Advanced Study. MacPherson is a professor in the School of Mathematics at the Institute.

“The standard of truth in mathematics has been constant for 2500 years,” MacPherson notes. “We accept a statement as mathematically true if we can prove it. The last century, however, has seen ripples in this standard. For example, G�del found statements that always hold but can’t be proved, computer scientists found statements whose proof would take longer than civilization is likely to endure, and physicists established interesting mathematical statements by physical reasoning rather than by proof.”

MacPherson’s lecture will examine these ideas, as well as a current controversy over a computer-assisted proof of the “Kepler Conjecture,” one of the oldest unsolved problems in mathematics.

MacPherson has been a faculty member in the School of Mathematics since 1994. He was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Brown University before joining the permanent faculty of the Institute. Visiting appointments have taken him to the University of Paris; the University of Chicago; the University of Utrecht; and the Max-Planck-Institut f�r Mathematic in Bonn, Germany, among other institutions. In 1985-86 he was a member in the School of Mathematics.

MacPherson is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. Recipient of the National Academy of Sciences Award in Mathematics in 1992, he won the American Mathematical Society’s Steele Prize in 2002. The Academy cited him for “his role in the introduction and application of radically new approaches to the topology of singular spaces,” while the AMS cited him (with Institute member Mark Goresky) for papers that “made possible investigations across a great spectrum of mathematics.” MacPherson has received honorary degrees from Brown University and the Universit� de Lille I France.

A graduate of Swarthmore College, MacPherson earned his Ph.D. at Harvard University.

The lecture is free and open to the public. For further information, call 609-734-8203.