Honored mathematician to give Kieval Lecture

John W. Milnor, director of the Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, will present the 1998 Kieval Lecture in Mathematics at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 22, in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium of Goldwin Smith Hall. His topic will be "Pasting Together Julia Sets."

The lecture is intended for mathematics undergraduates and the general public. According to Milnor, "This talk will describe one surprising example which illustrates the 'mating' construction, originated by Douady and Hubbard. By suitably pasting together two very complicated and skinny subsets of the plane, one can reconstruct a smooth two-dimensional sphere."

Milnor has taught at Princeton, UCLA and MIT and was for a time affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.

He is the 1962 recipient of the Fields Medal, the highest honor a mathematician can receive. He also has received the National Medal of Science, the Steele Prize and the Wolf Prize. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1963 and is a member of the International Mathematical Union and the American Mathematical Society.

He first distinguished himself while still a Princeton undergraduate, when he solved a previously unsolved problem about the geometry of knots. It is reported that he was not paying attention in class and thought the problem, mentioned as a conjecture, was assigned as homework.

The Kieval Lecture Series was established through a bequest from the late Henry S. Kieval '36 to encourage and inspire undergraduate students. The estate also funds a similar lecture in physics and annual prizes to outstanding seniors in mathematics and physics.