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Yan Lyansky, visiting assistant professor of mathematics, will speak on “Fractals, Pictures, Movies” noon today in Pardee Hall room 227.
The free event is sponsored by the Mathematical Adventures and Diversions series. Lunch will be provided.
“In a practical setting, fractals are used to describe the shape of snowflakes, ferns, and the design of tires,” says Lyansky. “Artistically, they are also used to create naturally occurring images, movies, and sounds. We will investigate some artistic fractals to see how they implement mathematical ideas.”
Lyansky spent last semester as visiting assistant professor of mathematics at University of Virgin Islands and held the same position at Villanova in 2001-02. He served as director of technology for the New York company b2bstreet.com from Jan. 2000 through August 2001.
He earned a B.S. and Ph.D. in 1993 and 2002, respectively, from Temple University, where he received the Francis James Sholomskas Memorial Award in Mathematics and the Honors Teaching Fellowship. His research included probability theory, mathematical physics, finance, chaos theory, quantum computing, and random walks.
Lyansky has pursued many interests outside academia. As a cyclist, he biked across the country in 1996, toured through Arizona and New Mexico in 1997, and went from Georgia to Texas in 2002. An expert-level mountain bike racer, he created the bike1.com/downtube.com cycling site with a Java chat room, on-line bike auction, bulletin board system, interactive classified ads, stolen bike database, and much more eight years ago.
He ran the Philadelphia Marathon and the Broad Street Run in 1996. He swam 60 miles in a semester for the SwimFit program at Temple University; was trained as a boxer by Joe Black, the former #3 middleweight in the world; and has been rated at 2088 in chess, a high-level expert, beating IM Zamora, the World Junior Speed Champion, in a rated game.
Lyansky also is fluent in Russian.
Mathematical Adventures and Diversions talks are on mathematical topics and applications often not encountered in mathematics courses. They are open to the Lafayette community and assume no special mathematical preparation on the part of the audience.