Isidore and Hilda Dressler Lectures
The Dressler Lecture Series was established by a gift from Robert and Leona Dressler on March 20, 1986, to the Kansas State University Foundation. The purpose of the gift is to honor the memories of Isidore and Hilda Dressler, and to provide funds from the interest on the endowment for annual lectures to to be given by internationally prominent mathematicians. The lecture series emphasizes mathematics as a foundational discipline for science, commerce, and the arts. The lectures also underscore the fact that mathematics is a creative field and that mathematical research is a response both to the needs of other sciences and to its own inner dynamic which compels the study of abstract patterns.
Isidore Dressler was born in New York City in 1908 and received his B.S. summa cum laude from the College of the City of New York in 1929 where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1928. After receiving his M.A. From Columbia University in 1933, he taught first at Boy's High School and then later at Bayside High School where he was chairman of the Department of Mathematics until 1969. After retiring in 1969 from Bayside High School, he served as Adjunct Professor at Pace University in New York City. Isidore Dressler was the author of over a dozen high-school mathematics texts.
Hilda Ratner Dressler received her B.S. from New York University in 1931 and her M.D. cum laude from Boston University in 1934. After her internship, she was appointed attending physician at New York Infirmary in 1940 and also began a private medical practice which she maintained for over 35 years. In 1984, she was appointed Physician Advisor at Flushing Hospital and Medical Center in New York City. She was president emerita of the Queens County Medical Society.
Speakers for 2012-2013
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September 18, 2012
Kannan Soundararajan (Stanford University)
The Riemann zeta-function and related L-functions: A progress report
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April 25, 2013
Roger Baker (Brigham Young University)
Sieves In Number Theory
Past Talks
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January 24, 2012
Ken Ono (Emory University)
Adding and Counting
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April 20, 2010
Bjorn Poonen (MIT)
Undecidability In Number Theory
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March 11, 2010
Trevor Wooley, FRS (University of Bristol)
Counting Integral Solutions of Diagonal Equations
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March 31, 2009
Jeff Vaaler (University of Texas at Austin)
The ABC Conjecture (video)
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April 22, 2008
Andrew Granville (University of Montreal)
Patterns in the Primes
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October 23, 2007
Sergei Konyagin (Moscow State University)
Good Distribution of the Values of Sparse Polynomials Modulo a Prime (video)
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December 6, 2005
Alf van der Poorten, AM (Centre for Number Theory Research, Sydney and School of Mathematics and Statistics, Sydney University)
Paper Folding, Automata, and Rational Functions
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April 16, 2002
Maxim Kontsevich (I.H.E.S., Bures-sur-Yvette, France and Rutgers University)
A New Viewpoint in Non-Archimedian Geometry
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March 27, 2001
Carl Pomerance (Bell Labs and Universtiy of Georgia)
Hard Number Theory Problems and Cryptography
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December 7, 1999
Gregory Margulis (Yale University)
Diophantine Approximation, Lattices and Flows On Homogenous Spaces
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March 18, 1999
Peter Sarnak (Princeton Univrsity)
Zeroes of Zeta Functions and Symmetry
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October 28,1997
Kenneth Ribet (University of California at Berkley)
Fermat's Last Theorem
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November 12, 1996
Michael Aschbacher (California Institute of Technology)
The Classification of the Finite Simple Groups
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October 24, 1995
Victor Kac (MIT)
Sums of Squares and Supersymmetry
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November 1, 1994
Joan Birman (Columbia University)
Studying Links Via Closed Braids
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November 2, 1993
Dennis Sullivan (Graduate School & University Center, CUNY)
On the Mathematics of Fluid Motion
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October 13, 1992
Louis de Branges (Purdue University)
A Construction of Invariant Subspaces
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October 22, 1991
Barry Mazur (Harvard University)
The Elliptic Modular Function & the Monster Group
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November 20, 1990
Enrico Bombieri (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton)
Solving f(x,y) = 0 in Rational Numbers and Integers: What We Know, and What We Don't Know
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February 27, 1990
Wolfgang Schmidt (University of Colorado)
Power Series Expansions of Algebraic Functions
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November 3, 1988
John Conway (Princeton University)
1, 11, 21, 1211, 111221, 312211, 13112221, ...?
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February 23, 1988
Hugh Montgomery (University of Michigan)
Irregularities of Point Distributions
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April 28, 1987
Daniel Gorenstein (Rutgers University)
The Enormous Theorem: Classifying the Finite Simple Groups
