Opening Speaker
Peter Borwein
Professor
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C.

Email:
pborwein@cecm.sfu.ca
Homepage:
http://wayback.cecm.sfu.ca/~pborwein
Paper:
Ramanujan, Modular Equations, and Approximations to Pi or How to compute One Billion Digits of Pi
Talk:
An Introduction to Organics Mathematics
(QuickTime movie - 1.5M)
Abstract:
Mathematics is more important now than it has ever been. More mathematics is done both inside universities and outside, in industry, than ever before. Admittedly not all of it is called mathematics---it might be called robotics, or financial analysis, or operations control, or engineering, or whatever---but when we look closely there is no doubt that we are living in the greatest Golden Age for mathematics, at least so far.

Mathematics has fundamentally affected technology, notably in computers. It is now clear that the reverse is also true. Technology, falling into 4 major categories, has already changed mathematics dramatically, and the pace of change is accelerating.