11/10/2008
Math Across Campus Seminar
Thursday, November 13, 2008
3:30 Kane Hall 210
Reception to follow
Abstract
The evolutionary genealogy of life is not just an evolutionary tree,
but a bunch of different tree-like diagrams. All of these trees are
interrelated and they exist in strange and difficult spaces,
entangled with each other. Biologists now realize that we need
mathematics and statistics to think clearly about inferring these
trees. Can the mathematicians help us do that?
About the speaker
Joe Felsenstein is a world-leader in evolutionary genetics and
phylogenies. He received a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of
Chicago in 1968 and currently holds positions at UW in the Departments of
Genome Sciences, Biology, Statistics, and Computer Science & Engineering.
He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has won numerous prestigious awards,
among which are the 1993 Sewall Wright Award, the 2000 Weldon Memorial
Prize, and the Darwin-Wallace Medal in 2008. He has published over
100 articles and is the author of the book "Inferring Phylogenies"
which reviewers have called an "instant classic".
Discussion session
There will be an informal discussion session with the speaker on
Friday, Nov 14 between 12:30-1:20pm in Miller 302-A. This is an
opportunity for interested students and faculty to ask more questions
and talk about open problems and research directions.
MathAcrossCampus is a new activity at UW whose main offering is a
quarterly colloquium on applications of mathematics. These talks are
meant to be widely accessible. See http://www.math.washington.edu/mac/
for more details and other activities under this umbrella.
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