Keynote Speaker Information

Dr. Steven Krantz

Bio
Steven G. Krantz is one of the most visible and respected mathematicians in the community today. He has written over 130 research papers and over 45 books, including How to Teach Mathematics and Mathematical Apocrypha. Krantz has won the Chauvenet Prize, the Beckenbach Book Award, and the Kemper Prize. He has worked as an editor of several book series, research journals, and for the Notices of the AMS. He is also the founder of the Journal of Geometric Analysis.

"A Matter of Gravity"
We discuss some new ideas about centers of gravity. Even in two dimensions there are observations that Newton or Bernoulli could have made but did not. In higher dimensions there are fundamentally new ideas. These are very recent discoveries, and are of interest to workers in robotics and quantum mechanics. They are also exciting ideas for a calculus class.

"How To Impress People While Preserving All Your Secrets"
We consider the Rivest-Shamir-Adelman (RSA) technique in cryptographic theory. Examples will be given of public-key encryption and decryption, with mathematical proofs provided. A particularly interesting application to the idea of "zero-knowledge proofs" will be presented.

Dr. Gerald Rising

Bio
Gerald Rising is a State University of New York Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus who is currently Co-Director of the University at Buffalo Gifted Math Program, which brings 250 bright high school students to the university to study math through grades 7-12. He is author of books about high school and elementary school math teaching, many school math texts and articles about math teaching. He was an NCTM board member and a member of the team that produced the original NCTM Standards. He is currently writing a book on calculator algorithms on which his talk is based.

"How Your Calculator Calculates: Square Root and Cosine"
For most of us our calculator is a kind of magic box. We key in 17, press a square root key and up pops 4.123105626. We key in 38, press a key marked "cos" and up pops 0.788010754. This talk will describe the school math that can produce this magic.