Tuesday, 21 July 2009
Terrence Tao will visit UWA and will present a special Colloquium on Compressed Sensing and the 2009 Clay-Mahler Public Lecture: The Cosmic Distance Ladder.


About Professor Terence Tao

Terrence Tao was born in Adelaide, Australia in 1975. He has been a professor of mathematics at UCLA since 1999, having completed his PhD under Elias Stein at Princeton in 1996.

Tao's areas of research include harmonic analysis, PDE, combinatorics, and number theory. He has received a number of awards, including the Salem Prize in 2000, the Bochner Prize in 2002, the Fields Medal and SASTRA Ramanujan Prize in 2006, the MacArthur Fellowship and Ostrowski Prize in 2007, and the Waterman Award in 2008.

Terence Tao also currently holds the James and Carol Collins chair in mathematics at UCLA, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Australian Academy of Sciences (Corresponding Member), and the National Academy of Sciences (Foreign Member).

The 2009 Clay-Mahler Public Lecture: The Cosmic Distance Ladder

How do we know the distances from the earth to the sun and moon, from the sun to the other planets, and from the sun to other stars and distant galaxies? Clearly we cannot measure these directly.

Nevertheless there are many indirect methods of measurement, combined with basic high-school mathematics, which can allow one to get quite convincing and accurate results without the need for advanced technology (for instance, even the ancient Greeks could compute the distances from the earth to the sun and moon to moderate accuracy).

These methods rely on climbing a "cosmic distance ladder", using measurements of nearby distances to then deduce estimates on distances slightly further away; we shall discuss several of the rungs in this ladder in this talk.

The Mahler lectures are a biennial activity organised by the Australian Mathematical Society. The 2009 Clay-Mahler lectures are funded by the Clay Mathematical Institute, the Australian Mathematical Society and the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute.

The details of the lecture are as follows:
Date: Thursday, 3 September 2009
Time: 6:00pm-7.00pm
Venue: Social Sciences Lecture Theatre, UWA (The nearest carpark is P3 off Hackett Drive Entrance 1)
Cost: Free. No RSVP required.
Enquiries: [email protected] or (+61 8) 6488 1340

For more information about the lecture please visit the website .


The 2009 Clay-Mahler Colloquium: Compressed Sensing

Suppose one wants to recover an unknown signal x in R^n from a given vector Ax=b in R^m of linear measurements of the signal x.  If the number of measurements m is less than the degrees of freedom n of the signal, then the problem is underdetermined and the solution x is not unique.

However, if we also know that x is sparse or compressible with respect to some basis, then it is a remarkable fact that (given some assumptions on the measurement matrix A) we can reconstruct x from the measurements b with high accuracy, and in some cases with perfect accuracy.

Furthermore, the algorithm for performing the reconstruction is computationally feasible. This observation underlies the newly developing field of compressed sensing. In this talk we will discuss some of the mathematical foundations of this field.

The details of the colloquium are as follows:
Date: Friday, 4 September 2009
Time: 1.00pm-2.00pm
Venue: Engineering Lecture Theatre 1, UWA

For more information about the colloquium please visit the website or contact Winthrop Professor Cheryl Praeger , School of Mathematics and Statistics, at [email protected]

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