A Focus on the Humanities Lecture with Jordan Ellenberg
Mathematics is often thought of as a source of certain knowledge, the domain in which we know precisely what things are and which statements are true. This can be reassuring for those of us (all of us) living in an uncertain world. But because we in fact live in an uncertain world, mathematics in this sense may have trouble getting purchase on problems we really care about. Real mathematical practice, both pure and applied, is full of fuzziness, approximation, metaphor, unclassifiability, and yes, uncertainty. In this Focus on the Humanities talk, Professor Jordan Ellenberg will try to convince you that, rather than using a false promise of mathematical precision to suppress uncertainty that makes us anxious, we should embrace uncertainty and use math as a tool for helping us think about it honestly.
Jordan Ellenberg is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Mathematics at UW-Madison. He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and has held a Sloan Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Simons Fellowship. His research centers on number theory but touches on algebraic geometry, topology, combinatorics, and applications of machine learning. He is also a popularizer of mathematics, whose books How Not To Be Wrong and Shape were both New York Times bestsellers.
This event is presented in partnership with the Institute for Research in the Humanities.