The Marden Lecture Series

Each Spring we invite a distinguished mathematician to lecture to a general audience. The Marden Lecture honors Morris Marden (1905 – 1991), who founded our graduate program and made our department a research department. The Marden lecture is funded through the Miriam and Morris Marden Fund and is co-sponsored by the Department of Mathematical Sciences.


Here are the past and upcoming Marden Lecturers (there was no lecture in 1991):

  • 2022: Amie Wilkinson, University of Chicago                                                                     Watch: The mathematics of déjà vu
  • 2021: Ridgway Scott, University of Chicago
    Watch: A Modern Approach to Simulating Flight
  • 2020: Lauren Ancel Meyers, University of Texas-Austin
     Watch: Modeling to Mitigate the COVID-19 Pandemic
  • 2019: James Yorke, University of Maryland, The Many Facets of Chaos
  • 2018: Vaughan Jones, Vanderbilt University, Why Quantum Theory Chooses Von Neumann Algebras
  • 2017: Béla Bollobás, University of Memphis / Trinity College, Cambridge
    The Greatest Codebreaker and His Mathematics
  • 2016: Eugenia Cheng, University of Sheffield/School of the Art Institute of Chicago
    Watch: How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics
  • 2015: Steve Schreve, Carnegie Mellon University
    Watch: Lessons Learned from the Financial Crisis
  • 2014: Jordan Ellenberg, UW-Madison
    How to Get Rich Playing the Lottery
  • 2013: Carlos Castillo-Chavez, Arizona State University
    Infectious Disease, Epidemics, Public Health, and Mathematical Models
  • 2012: Thomas Hales, University of Pittsburgh
    Math Blunders and How to Do Without Them
  • 2011: Fernando Q. Gouvea, Colby College
    Games Numbers Play
  • 2010: Roger Howe,Yale University
    Symmetry: More than Pretty Pictures
  • 2009: Professor Denis Hirschfeldt, University of Chicago
    Waking Up from Leibniz’ Dream: Alan Turing and the unmechanizability of Truth
  • 2008: Professor John H. Hubbard, Department of Mathematics, Cornell University and Universite de Provence
    The Dynamics of the Forced Damped Pendulum
  • 2007: Professor David E. Keyes, Columbia University, Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, and Acting Director of the Institute for Scientific Computing Research (ISCR) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
    Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing
  • 2006: Dr. Jeff Weeks, Freelance Mathematician, Ph.D. Princeton
    The Shape of Space
  • 2005: Dr. Tony DeRose, Senior Scientist and Head of Research
    Pixar Animation Studios
    Math in the Movies
  • 2004: Professor R. Daniel Mauldin, Regents Professor,
    Department of Mathematics, University of North Texas
    Some Musings about Mathematics
  • 2003: Harold M. Edwards, Professor of Mathematics, New York University
    Factorization and Cryptography: How Simple Arithmetic Led to Amazingly Secure Codes
  • 2002: Emmanuele DiBenedetto, Centennial Professor of Mathematics
    Vanderbilt University
    Some Mathematical Models on Visual Transduction
  • 2001: Mel Slugbate, Slugbate and Mossbutter Real Estate Agency
    and
    Colin Adams, Williams College
    Real Estate in Hyperbolic Space: Investment Opportunities for the New Millennium
  • 2000: Fern Hunt, National Institute of Standards and Technology
    PAINT: From modeling and simulation to computer graphics
  • 1999: Alexander Lipton-Lifschitz, Bankers Trust and University of Illinois-Chicago
    Applications of Mathematics on Wall Street and Beyond
  • 1998: De Witt Sumners, Florida State University
    The Topology of DNA
  • 1997: H. Edelsbrunner, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Department of Computer Science)
    Circles and Triangles Modeling Shape and Deformation
  • 1996: James A. Yorke, University of Maryland; Director of the Institute for Physical Science & Technology
    Chaos in Dynamical Processes
  • 1995: Richard Askey, University of Wisconsin-Madison
    How to Count Objects: The Binomial Theorem and Extensions
  • 1994: William Dunham, Muhlenberg College
    A Tribute to Euler
  • 1993: Guido Weiss, Washington University
    Why Fourier Series are Important and Natural
  • 1992: Simon Hellerstein, University of Wisconsin-Madison
    Where Have All the Zeros Gone?
  • 1990: Walter Rudin, University of Wisconsin-Madison
    Set Theory: An Offspring of Analysis
  • 1989: Saunders MacLane, University of Chicago
    Mysteries & Marvels of Mathematics