|
|
|
|
Preskenis Dinner Main Page Thirteenth - 2015
|
Thirteenth - 2015 Jim has a special connection to Ken as well as to Framingham State University. Jim and Ken were classmates at Boston College and, then, shared an apartment in Providence, Rhode Island while they were graduate students at Brown University. As Ken pursued his doctorate under the direction of Dr. Andrew Browder, Jim earned his Ph.D. under the direction of Dr. John Wermer. Sharon, Jim's wife, is a graduate of Framingham State University and an Associate Professor at University of Kentucky. Dr. Brennan, author of more than twenty-seven
publications, has been a Professor at the University of Kentucky for
more than thirty years. He has held several visiting appointments
including at the Centre De Recerca Matematica, Institut D’Estudis
Catalans, Belleterra (Barcelona), Spain and Institut Mittag-Leffler,
Djursholm, Sweden. Dr. Brennan's invited lectures include
international conferences held at Mathematisches
Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach, Oberwolfach, Germany and Institut
Mittag-Leffler, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Djursholm, Sweden as
well as, during June 2014, the Tenth International Conference on
Nonlinear Analysis, Function Spaces and Applications (NAFSA 10) Třešť,
Czech Republic. Abstract: “The infinite! No other question”, declared David Hilbert, “has ever moved so profoundly the spirit of man.” Without assuming any specialized knowledge of the audience, it is my goal to lay the foundation for a deeper understanding of Hilbert’s remark by engaging in a conversation around some of the paradoxes associated with the concept of infinity. The most famous are perhaps Zeno's paradoxes of motion which are still being debated today. On the other hand, one of the works in the Aristotelian corpus, known as Mechanica, contains a problem which attracted wide attention at an earlier time, but is now hardly mentioned. That is the problem of Aristotle's Wheel, which is exemplified in something as ordinary as a common rolling pin. Nevertheless, more than two millennia after its inception, the problem surrounding the Wheel played a central role in Galileo's greatest work, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, published in 1638. The occasion in the Dialogues prompting a discussion of the Wheel is a question as important as the ultimate constitution of matter. After examining a few seemingly paradoxical ideas and noting their impact in the long history of thought, I hope that by evening's end you can, with William Blake, begin
Dinner Meeting Program Lecture Program We thank Sodexho, the Office of the Vice President of Academic Affairs, the Office of Development and Alumni Relations, the Sheraton Framingham Hotel & Conference Center, Cengage Learning, W.H. Freeman - part of Macmillan Education, and Pearson Education for their support of the 2015 NES/MAA Dinner Meeting in Memory of Kenneth J. Preskenis.
|
|
|
|
