The Faculty of Applied Sciences, Technology, and Engineering organized a lecture titled “Knots and Mathematics” by Professor Haynes Miller, Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on Tuesday, 25 April 2023.
In this talk, which was held at Brother Joe Hall, Prof. Miller described some of the history of this subject and the classification of “rational tangles,” building blocks that occur in a program pursued by the late John Conway to classify knots. We will end with a proof by square dance.
Haynes Miller has been a Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1986. His research is in algebraic topology, and he has directed some thirty Ph.D. theses in the subject. He has served as editor for eleven disciplinary journals, including as Managing Editor of the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Association. In 2005 he was named a MacVicar Faculty Fellow, the highest teaching honor at MIT, and was the 2006 recipient of the Graduate Student Council Teaching Award. He created the MIT Mathlets — a collection of computer-based mathematical manipulatives — and the ongoing Online Seminar on Undergraduate Mathematics Education, OLSUME. He is a core faculty supporter of the MIT-Haiti Initiative, a project promoting active learning and use in schools of the Haitian mother tongue rather than French. Miller was a local organizer of the Third Annual Gathering for Scientists for Palestine at MIT in January 2020 and is now involved with the Palestinian Student Research Program.