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Abstract: Over 400 years ago, Sir Walter Raleigh asked his mathematical assistant to find formulas for the number of cannonballs in regularly stacked piles. These investigations aroused the curiosity of the great astronomer, Johannes Kepler, and led to a problem that has gone centuries without a solution: why is the familiar cannonball stack the most efficient arrangement possible?
This talk will describe the history of this and some related problems in geometry. It will explain why this innocent question has been unanswerable until now. It will describe how computer technology has finally led to a solution to Kepler's problem.
About the Speaker: An expert in representation theory, analysis, algebra, and physics, Dr. Hales received his MS and BS degress at Stanford in 1982, and his Ph.D. at Princeton in 1986 under the Harold W. Dodds Honorific Fellowship.
He then went on to do postdoctoral research at MSRI in Berkley, California, and then to Harvard, where he was an assistant professor for two years.
He completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study the following year. He was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago from 1990-93. In 1993, he came to the University of Michigan as an associate professor.
He has won the College of Literature, Science and Arts Excellence in Education Award as well as the Henry Russell Award for 1999.
