Lecture

A new initiative co-organized with the School of Art, Media, and Technology and the Fine Arts Program Parsons, this lecture series captures the increasingly trans-disciplinary nature of scientific, academic, artistic, and cultural practices and, in particular, focuses on the complex cross-disciplinary settings for arts production in contemporary life.

Mathematics is often described as the science of patterns. This implies that it is primarily concerned with visualizing, analyzing, and predicting the phenomena we observe in the physical world and in the relationships we see among numbers. But mathematics also looks at the unpredictable, the unexpected. In the second talk of this series, Jennifer Wilson explores what it means to be truly random; how the probability of unlikely events changes depending on how the question is asked; and how stable patterns can become chaotic and then stable again as we change the way we look at them.

Jennifer Wilson’s lecture is paired with a presentation on September 11, 2010, of Change Encounters, a new project on probabilities, predictions and prophecies by 2009-2010 Vera List Center Fellows Lin + Lam.

Jennifer Wilson is Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Eugene Lang College. She received her B.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of British Columbia, and her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton University in Harmonic Analysis and Partial Differential Equations. Her primary research interests are in mathematics applied to the social sciences, particularly cooperative game theory and voting theory, and she recently co-authored a series of papers analyzing the Democratic Party Presidential Primary. She is also interested in the role of visualization in mathematics, and is currently working on a collaborative project to examine how illustrations are used to convey financial information.