IAS Si Yuan Professor designate, and Chair Professor of Mathematics designate, Prof Gunther Uhlmann shares his insights on how to make visible objects invisible and vice versa.
In the first part of the lecture Prof Uhlmann will describe how to make invisible objects visible, that is to how make an image of the inside of an object by making measurements on the outside. In the second part of the talk Prof Uhlmann will describe how to make visible objects invisible, in particular how to build a coat of invisibility a la Harry Potter.
About the speaker
Prof Gunther Uhlmann obtained his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976. After postdoctoral positions at Harvard University, the Courant Institute and MIT, he joined the MIT faculty in 1980. He moved to the University of Washington in 1984. He is currently Excellence in Teaching Chair in Mathematics at University of California at Irvine and Walker Family Endowed Professor in Mathematics at the University of Washington.
Prof Uhlmann's main current fields of interest are inverse problems, partial differential equations, microlocal analysis and scattering theory. He received the Sloan Fellowship in 1984 and Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001. He was an invited lecturer at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1998. He was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009 and Fellow of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in 2010. In 2011, he was awarded the Bocher Prize by the American Mathematical Society and the Kleinman Prize by SIAM.
