Nov 30, 2017
Roger Nelson talking on Visual Gems on Number Theory in Brown Bag Seminar
Roger Nelson, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics, is an inspiring researcher from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon who was presenting on Visual Gems on Number Theory in the Brown Bag Seminar on November 21, 2017. His field is probability and visualization in mathematics on which he also has written several books.
While preparing this talk, Prof. Nelsen looked through several number theory texts. He was struck by how few illustrations most of them have. An integer can represent many things—the cardinality of a set, the length of a line segment, the area of a region, the volume of a solid, etc. So the texts should have more pictures. In this talk Prof. Nelson tries to remedy that, and presented some of his favorite pictures for use in studying number theory, what is now called visual gems of number theory.
Besides this interesting topic, Prof. Nelson has contributed the foundation to the copula theory by his textbook “An Introduction to Copulas” (Springer, 1999). This book is „must-read“ for everybody who work in the field of dependence modeling.