I would like to deal with the problem of being neither an applied mathematician nor a pure mathematician, yet feel that I am a mathematician. Historical examples such as Newton, von Neumann, Turing and Watson-Crick will be discussed. Also I will try to understand what I am doing now (mathematics?). I will go back to my Ann Arbor days 1948-1956 in these discussions.

Sponsored by the Department of Mathematics, the LSA Bicentennial Theme Semester and the Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics. A reception for Professor Smale will be held immediately following the lecture in the Mathematics Department second floor atrium. Speaker(s): Stephen Smale (University of California, Berkeley)