The 2012 Serge Lang Undergraduate Lecture will be given on Friday, November 16 at 4:10PM in room 105 Northgate on the Berkeley campus. Our lecturer this year is mathematical physicist John Baez.
MUSA and the Department of Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley, present
The 2012 Serge Lang Undergraduate Lecture
John Baez
Department of Mathematics
University of California Riverside
The Mathematics of Planet Earth
Abstract: The International Mathematical Union has declared 2013 to be the year of The Mathematics of Planet Earth. The global warming crisis is part of a bigger transformation in which humanity realizes that the Earth is a finite system and that our population, energy usage, and the like cannot continue to grow exponentially. If civilization survives this transformation, it will affect mathematics - and be affected by it - just as dramatically as the agricultural revolution or industrial revolution. We cannot know for sure what the effect will be, but we can already make some guesses.