David R. Stone Distinguished Lectures & CLEC Lectures

About the Lectures

Since 2005, the Mathematics Department holds an annual Distinguished Lecture which is now generously sponsored by a gift of Professor David R. Stone, a pilar of Georgia Southern Mathematics’ department for 49 years.
The lecture is a cornerstone in Georgia Southern’s mission of diffusion of knowledge in South East Georgia.
It enables those with an interest in the subject to see the best mathematicians share the pleasures and beauty of mathematics.
The format of the lecture lets a distinguished mathematician addresses an audience of undergraduates and non experts to show the wide scope of the subject.

Besides the Distinguished Lecture, the department also holds regular CLEC lectures to highlight the interaction of mathematics with other fields.
The public lectures are followed by a more specialized colloquium aimed at mathematicians from the area.
Past lecturers include world renown scholars in mathematics and tangential domains.

David R. Stone

The Stone Distinguished Lecture Series is endowed in honor of Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, David R. Stone, Ph.D., who taught at Georgia Southern University for 49 years.

Stone’s passion focused on inspiring students to study mathematics. He developed and taught the mathematics course in the Bell Honors Program curriculum, and later taught courses and directed honors thesis projects in the University Honors Program. He was also instrumental in starting the student chapter of the Mathematical Association of America on campus and advised the Math Jeopardy Team for many years.

Stone was a tireless worker within the mathematics education community, working with local schools,coaching math teams for tournaments and serving as state director of the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education.

Over the years, Stone was recognized for his many contributions to the profession. He received numerous awards including the 1993 Gladys M. Thomason Award for Distinguished Service and the 2005 John Neff Award from the Georgia Council of Teachers of Mathematics. He also received the Mathematical Association of America’s Southeastern Section Awards for Distinguished Service in 1998 and Distinguished Teaching in 2005, as well as the Certificate of Meritorious Service in 2009.

On campus, he received the Georgia Southern Award for Excellence in Contributions to Instruction in 1988 and the Award for Excellence in Service on 2000, one of only a select few faculty members to receive both awards.

Stone’s 49 years of teaching and service to Georgia Southern and his service to the profession have been recognized by creating the David R. Stone Senior Mathematics Major Award, which is presented each year to outstanding graduating seniors in the department, and also through an endowment by Stone and his wife, Ann Stone.

Past Distinguished Lecturers

Year	Lecturer	University	Title
2019 (Fall)	David Mumford	Brown	Are AI scientists about to build fully human robots?
2018 (Spring)	Vaughn F.R. Jones	Vanderbilt and Berkeley	What is it about the Plane?
2017 (Spring)	Doron Zeilberger	Rutgers	What is Mathematics and what should it be?
2015 (Fall)	Jerry Bona	UIC	Mathematics and the ocean
2014 (Fall)	Sergein Tabachnikov	Penn State & ICERM Brown	Proofs not from the book
2014 (Spring)	Peter J Olver	University of Minnesota	Digital imagery: object recognition and symmetry detection
2013 (Fall)	Richard Stanley	MIT	Plane Tilings
2012 (Spring)	Ken Ono	Emory University	Adding and Counting
2011 (Spring)	Thomas Banchoff	Brown	Seeing Things in Four-space
2010 (Spring)	Frank Morgan	Williams College	The Double Bubble Theorem
2009 (Spring)	Christopher Sogge	John Hopkins	Blowup Rates for Eigenfunctions and Quasimodes
2008 (Spring)	George Andrews	Penn State	Euler and the Beginning of the Theory of Partitions
2007 (Spring)	Gilbert Strang	MIT	Teaching and Learning Computational Science and Engineering
2006 (Spring)	Gene Golub	Stanford University	Numerical Methods for Rapid Computation of Page Rank
2005 (Spring)	Carl de Boor	University of Wisconsin	…

Past CLEC Lecturers

Year	Lecturer	University	Title
2018 (Fall)	Kevin Knudson	University of Florida	The Mathematics of Gerrymandering
2016 (Fall)	Igor Belykh	Georgia State	Our brains from a complex network perspective
2016 (Spring)	Randy Kamien	University of Pennsylvania	The mathematics of paper
2015 (Spring)	Dmitri Tymoczko	Princeton	The geometry of music
2012 (Spring)	Nina Fefferman	Rutgers	Math, Complexity, and Social Groups: Using math to understand the nature of society
2005 (Spring)	Ralph Kopperman	City College of New-York	Not all points are created equal

Last updated: 9/10/2021