Jean Bourgain Discusses the Search for Randomness

Although the concept of randomness is ubiquitous, it turns out to be difficult to generate a truly random sequence of events. Jean Bourgain, Professor in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study, will address this puzzle in his talk, Search for Randomness. The lecture will take place on Wednesday, March 25, at 4:30 p.m. in Wolfensohn Hall on the Institute’s campus.

The need for “pseudorandomness” in various parts of modern science, ranging from numerical simulation to cryptography, has challenged our limited understanding of this issue and our mathematical resources. In this talk, Bourgain will explore some of the problems of pseudorandomness and tools to address them.

Bourgain joined the faculty of the Institute in 1994, the same year he was awarded the Fields Medal. His work touches on many central topics of mathematical analysis: the geometry of Banach spaces, harmonic analysis, ergodic theory, spectral problems and nonlinear partial differential equations from mathematical physics and combinatorial number theory. His contributions solved longstanding problems in convexity theory and harmonic analysis such as Mahler’s conjecture and the lambda-p set problem.

Bourgain’s work also has had important consequences in theoretical computer science and on exponential sums in analytic number theory. In Hamiltonian dynamics, he developed the theory of invariant Gibbs measures and quasi-periodicity for the Schrödinger equation.

Bourgain received his education at the Free University of Brussels, where he was awarded a Ph.D. in 1977 and his Habilitation in 1979. He was a Research Fellow at the National Science Foundation in Belgium (1975-81), Professor at the Free University of Brussels (1981-85) and J.L. Doob Professor of Mathematics at the University of Illinois (1985-2006). He also served as Professor at IHÉS in France (1985-95), Lady Davis Professor of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1988) and Fairchild Distinguished Professor at California Institute of Technology (1991).

Among his awards are the Empain Prize (1983), the Dr. A. De Leeuw Damry-Bourlart Prize (1985), the Langevin Prize (1985), the E. Cartan Prize (1990) and the Ostrowski Prize (1991). Bourgain is a Foreign Member of the Académie des Sciences (France), the Academia Europaea, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Polish Academy.
For further information about this event, which is free and open to the public, please call 609-734-8175, or visit the Public Events page on the Institute website, www.ias.edu.