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Abstract: Mathematicians are just beginning to understand soap bubbles on their way to understanding the universe. Try your own intuition and luck in this guessing contest, which includes soap bubble demonstrations, explanations, and prizes. You don't need to know anything.
About the speaker: Frank Morgan works in minimal surfaces and studies the behavior and structure of minimizers in various dimensions and settings. His three texts all have new editions: Geometrics Measure Theory: a Beginner's Guide 1995, Calulus Lite 1997, and Riemannian Geomtry: a Beginner's Guide 1998.
Morgan went to MIT and Princeton, where his thesis advisor, Fred Almgren, introduced him to minimal surfaces. He then taught for ten years at MIT, where he served for three years as Undergraduate Mathematics Chairman, received the Everett Moore Baker Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching, and held the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Chair. He spent leave years at Rice, Stanford, and the Institute for Advanced Study. He served on the NSF Math Advisory Committee from 1994-97, and as chair of the Hudson River Undergraduate Mathematics Conference in 1997. In January, 1993, he received one of the first MAA national awards for distinguished teaching. In 1995 he represented mathematics research at the exhibition for Congress by the Coalition for National Science Funding. He received the Allen High School Distinguished Alumni Award and an honorary doctorate from Cedar Crest College.
For several years Morgan served at Williams as Mathematics Department Chair and codirector of an NSF undergraduate research project. Work of his undergraduate Geometry Group is featured in the 1994 AMS What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences. He has recently been named as Dennis Meenan '54 Third Century Professor of Mathematics.
Morgan has a biweekly Math Chat column in the Christian Science Monitor and a weekly live call-in Math Chat show on local cable TV, both available via his web page at http://www.williams.edu/Mathematics/fmorgan/. He gives over forty talks a year, at venues ranging from research seminars to high schools. For 1997-98 he held the new Visiting Professorship for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University
