In December 2023, Professor Stephen Kirkland of the University of Manitoba delivered the Calvin and Jean Long Lecture. Professor Kirkland’s talk “Spite, Snakes, and Socialites: An Improbable Prelude to Markov Chains,” discussed the colorful history of this important mathematical tool and gave several important applications, as well as some whimsical applications: the board game Chutes and Ladders and the attendance record of a group of socialites at tea parties. Professor Kirkland also presented a department colloquium the next day.
Kirkland held positions at the University of Regina and the National University of Ireland Maynooth before his appointment at the University of Manitoba in 2013. In addition to his extensive research accomplishments in matrix theory and graph theory, Kirkland has served as editor in chief of the journal Linear and Multilinear Algebra and served as the president of the International Linear Algebra Society from 2008 to 2014.
Professor Randall LeVeque of the University of Washington presented the 41st Annual T.G. Ostrom Lecture in April 2024. Professor LeVeque, in a talk titled “Numerical Simulation of Floods and Tsunamis,” discussed software he has helped develop that creates simulations of these disastrous events that can be used in hazard planning and mitigation. The next day, Professor Leveque gave a colloquium talk in which he described a model that predicts tsunami wave heights from earthquake data. By using earthquake simulations and using this to train a model, the effects of tsunamis can be calculated within minutes of the earthquake event.
LeVeque is a prolific researcher who is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Long Lecture honors Professor Emeritus Calvin Long who served as a faculty member in the department from 1956 until 1992, serving as department chair from 1970 to 1978.
The Ostrom Lecture honors the late Professor Theodore G. Ostrom who made fundamental and outstanding contributions to the field of finite geometries. Professor Ostrom retired from WSU in 1981 after serving on the faculty for 21 years.