Friday, November 16th, 4:00pm, Kerchof Hall 317
Speaker: Prof. Karen Parshall (UVa Department of History and UVa Department of Mathematics)
Title: Historical Perspectives on Partition Theory: The Work of James Joseph Sylvester and His Graduate Students at Johns Hopkins University (1876-1883)

Abstract: The British algebraist, James Joseph Sylvester, served as Professor of Mathematics at the Johns Hopkins University from 1876 to 1883. There, Sylvester had, for the first time on American shores, the institutional mandate of training graduate students to become original researchers. One of the areas of mathematics in which he engaged his students was the theory of partitions, a topic into which he had been drawn by his own research in invariant theory. This talk will explore both the unique institutional setting in which Sylvester and his students found themselves at Hopkins and the original research that they produced.