Mahler Public Lecture at U Adelaide

Mahler Lecture Tour 2019

Event: Public lecture
Date & Time: Friday 13 December: 14:10–15:00
Venue: The University of Adelaide. Room LG28, Lower Napier Building
Speaker: Dr Holly Krieger (University of Cambridge, UK)

The Mahler lectures are a biennial activity organised by the Australian Mathematical Society, and supported by the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute, in which a prominent mathematician tours Australian universities giving lectures at a variety of levels, including giving several public lectures.

Title: A Tour of the Mandelbrot Set

Abstract

The beautiful and complicated Mandelbrot set has captivated mathematicians since the first computer images of the set were drawn in the 1970s and 1980s. In this talk we’ll take a walk around the infinite intricacies of the Mandelbrot set, exploring the spirals, finding Fibonacci, and answering the question every maths student wonders when they first meet the Mandelbrot set: why do we care about this pretty picture?

Biography

Born and raised near Chicago, Dr Holly Krieger completed the undergraduate mathematics honors program at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She went on to a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her initial research interests during graduate school were primarily in arithmetic and Diophantine geometry. Under the guidance of Laura DeMarco and Ramin Takloo-Bighash, her thesis work focused on the emerging field of arithmetic dynamics, which studies the relationship between dynamics of one complex variable and the arithmetic geometry of abelian varieties.

She followed her PhD work with an NSF postdoctoral fellowship at MIT under the supervision of Bjorn Poonen, during which time she became particularly interested in problems of unlikely intersections in complex dynamics. Since 2016, she has been the Corfield Lecturer at the University of Cambridge as well as a Fellow at Murray Edwards College.

supported by AMSI.