Thursday June 14th     8PM     

We know that sounds can be broken down into their component sine waves,images to the intensity of their pixels. Mathematicians refer to such building blocks as "basis functions" - if you know these, you can generate other works from them. In this talk, we'll see how this idea arises in a variety of contexts - not just in the finite element method, used to solve engineering problems, but even fiction! We'll also briefly look at some other connections between the two fields I work in: writing and applied mathematics. 

Manil Suri is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His fiction (including the novels The Death of Vishnu, The Age of Shiva and The City of Devi) has been translated into 27 languages. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, writing op-eds on mathematics, India and LGBT rights. He is in the process of completing a new novel, The Godfather of Numbers, which explains mathematics to non-mathematicians