Local Mathematician to Give Annual Sulski Memorial Lecture at Holy Cross

WORCESTER, Mass. – Professor Donal B. O'Shea, dean of faculty and vice president for academic affairs at Mount Holyoke College and the Elizabeth T. Kennan Professor of Mathematics, will give the 15th annual Leonard C. Sulski Memorial Lecture in Mathematics on Tuesday, April 22 at 8 p.m. in room 519 of the Hogan Campus Center at the College of the Holy Cross.  The lecture, titled “The Shape We're In: The Poincaré Conjecture,” is free and open to the public.

O’Shea is well known as an expositor of mathematics, and his recent monograph titled “The Poincaré Conjecture: In Search of the Shape of the Universe,” is an excellent description of the history and development of the recent solution to the Poincaré Conjecture, one of the most famous problems in mathematics.  His lecture will describe this problem and its solution in a manner accessible to a general mathematical audience.

O'Shea has served on the faculty at Mount Holyoke College since 1980, and became dean in 1998. His mathematical research is centered around the geometry of singularities of real and complex hypersurfaces, an area which involves differential, hyperbolic and algebraic geometry.

The author of numerous books, monographs, and articles, he has spent a year each in France and Germany and two at the University of Hawaii conducting research on singular points of real and complex hypersurfaces. His goal is to improve the teaching of geometry at the college level, as well as to make the study of mathematics in general more accessible to students of differing abilities and interests.

O'Shea has received numerous grants; most recently he received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for institute-wide reform in science laboratories at Mount Holyoke. He has also received grants from the Dana Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and the NSF totaling more than $1.5 million.

The annual lecture series is a tribute to Professor Sulski, who taught in the mathematics department at Holy Cross from 1965 until his untimely death from leukemia in 1991.