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Peter Winkler, director of fundamental mathematics research at the Lucent Technologies Mathematical Sciences Research Center, will speak on “Games People Don’t Play” 4:15 p.m. tomorrow in Pardee Hall room 227.
The free event is sponsored by the new Math Club. Refreshments will be provided.
The club’s description of the event: “Not all games are to play; some of the most amusing are designed just to think about. Is the game fair? What’s the best strategy? We will describe several games collected from various sources. An odd (actually, even) feature of this list is that each game has two versions, with surprising contrasts between the two. Time permitting, there are four pairs of games: the first involving numbers, the second hats, the third cards, and the fourth gladiators.”
Winkler served as director of the Research Group in Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science at Bellcore (now Telcordia Technologies) from 1989-94; chaired the department of mathematics and computer science at Emory University, where he taught from 1977-91; taught at Stanford University from 1975-77; and served in the U.S. Navy from 1968-71.
He earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale in 1975 and his bachelor’s in mathematics from Harvard in 1968. He has received research grants from the National Science Foundation and won the Lester R. Ford Award from the Mathematical Association of America in 1991. He has established eight patents, and has one pending, in marine navigation, cryptology, holography, distributed computing, and optical networking.
Winkler’s research area is in discrete mathematics and the theory of computing; especially combinatorics, probability theory, and applications.