The speaker will first reflect on his path to academia and the lack of access to higher education that certain groups of students in our society are still experiencing today. His talk will include his views on the progress (or lack thereof) made in increasing the participation of women and minorities in mathematics in the sixty years since the University of Michigan awarded Dr. Marjorie Lee Browne a Ph.D. The talk will then turn to a discussion of the historical influence the isoperimetric problem of Queen Dido has had on some areas of modern mathematics. George Pólya's 1954 statement,”The isoperimetric theorem, deeply rooted in our experience and intuition, so easy to conjecture but not so easy to prove, is an inexhaustible source of inspiration,” will be explored, with examples from Brownian motion and Lévy processes. Such examples extend far beyond the classical isoperimetric property of Faber-Krahn for eigenvalues of the Laplacian. Some examples of “easy to conjecture” but yet unsolved isoperimetric problems will be discussed.

Speaker: : Rodrigo Banuelos, Professor and Head, Department of Mathematics, Purdue University