The conferences, along with a stream of visits by prominent mathematicians, have led not only to research collaboration with Centre members, but also to a series of valuable lectures and seminars. Professor Steve Smale, for instance, gave a highly successful public lecture entitled, "What is Chaos?". His series of lectures on Complexity and Real Computation was published in the first issue of the Centre's Lecture Notes in Mathematics. Subsequent issues in the series include:
The State of Art in Spectral Methods by Professor Benyu Guo, former President of the Shanghai University of Science and Technology, and a former Visiting Research Professor in the Mathematics Department at City University.
Analytic Methods in the Solution of Convection Diffusion Equations by former Visiting Research Professor P L Sachdev, a member of the Indian National Academy of Sciences.
Introduction to Martingale Methods in Option Pricing by Professor Jia-an Yan, a visiting scholar from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and President of the Society and Probability and Statistics in China.
Introduction to Cohomology by Professor Raoul Bott (to be published). Professor Bott is a former visiting professor of the Centre, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the French Academy of Sciences, and a holder of numerous esteemed awards and honours.
The book Complexity and Real Computation (1998)- by Visiting Professor Lenore Blum, Associate Professor Felipe Cucker, Distinguished University Professor Steve Smale and Dr Mike Shub of the US - created a stir in mathematical circles by pointing the way to a meeting of scientific computation and theoretical computer. The authors suggest that the modern computer can be idealized in the same way that Newton idealized the discrete universe. By refusing to be bound by the digital nature of the computer, the authors have presented a new theory of computation which can deal with the real, physical world. The Turing theory is preserved as a special case of the theory, which means that results from computer science can give insights into numerical analysis, and vice versa.
Authors from left to right: Dr Mike Shub, Professor Lenore Blum,
Dr Felipe Cucker, Professor Steve Smale
