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Kieval Lecture: Optics, Mirages, and Curved Space

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Dr. Stephen J. Trettel, Szegö Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University, will deliver the 76th semi-annual Harry S. Kieval Lecture at HSU on Thursday, November 4th.

The lecture will be at 7:30 pm in Room 135 of the Science-B Building on the Humboldt State University campus. The public is welcome to this free lecture, which is geared toward a general audience. Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, masks are required regardless of vaccination status. See https://campusready.humboldt.edu/ for details about HSU’s pandemic safety procedures. The title of the lecture is “Optics, Mirages, and Curved Space”. Dr. Trettel will discuss the fascinating nature of light. Various surprising phenomena, such as mirrors, lenses, mirages, and the twinkling of stars, makes developing a unified description of light’s behavior rather subtle. Dr. Trettel will discuss the quest for a theory of light, from antiquity to the present, focusing on Fermat’s paradigm-shifting view that all of light’s properties follow from one simple rule: in every circumstance, light simply endeavors to take the most efficient path between its source and the viewer. Other surprising phenomena will be discussed, such as ring-like mirages appearing in images from the Hubble space telescope, along with Einstein’s great insight: that gravity is not a force, but just a consequence of living in a curved world. Dr. Trettel’s research focuses primarily on low-dimensional topology and differential geometry. He grew up in Minnesota and completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Minnesota before moving to California to pursue a PhD at UC Santa Barbara, graduating in 2019. Steve is passionate about mathematical illustration, and particularly enjoys tackling difficult visualization problems with a computer. For more information about Dr. Trettel, visit http://www.stevejtrettel.site/. The Kieval lecture series is named for HSU Mathematics Professor Emeritus, Dr. Harry S. Kieval, who taught at HSU from 1966 to 1979. The series includes topics on popular and/or broad aspects of mathematics attractive to undergraduates and the public. For more information, visit https://math.humboldt.edu/get-involved/kieval-lecture. Dr. Trettel will also give a separate lecture as a part of the Mathematics Colloquium earlier the same day. That lecture titled, “The (possible) shapes of space: 3-dimensional topology and geometrization,” will begin at 4 p.m. in Room 166 of the Behavioral and Social Sciences (BSS) building on the HSU campus. As with the evening lecture, masks are required regardless of vaccination status. The colloquium talk is also free to the public. Visit https://math.humboldt.edu/get involved/mathematics-colloquium for more information.

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• Free