Join the Applied Mathematics department for the 15th annual Menger Lecture.

Karl Menger was one of the finest mathematicians of the twentieth century and made significant contributions to the fields of dimension theory, probability, economics, ethics, geometry, and calculus. He was a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics at Illinois Tech from 1946 to 1971, and influenced many students, fellow faculty members, and friends during his lifetime.

The 2025 distinguished Menger lecturer is Lior S. Pachter, Bren Professor of Computational Biology, California Institute of Technology. He will deliver his lecture on “A Mathematical Tour of the Molecular Biology of the Cell,” on Friday, April 11, 2025, 6 p.m., at the MTCC Auditorium.

Abstract

Recent technological advancements in genomics have enabled genome-wide measurements of transcriptional dynamics in cells, providing exceptional resolution for mathematical models in systems biology. I will survey the mathematical foundations of these models and theories, highlighting key discoveries and open problems at the intersection of mathematics and molecular biology.

Speaker Biography

Lior S. Pachter is the Bren professor of computational biology at Caltech. His research interests span the mathematical and biological sciences, and he has authored over 100 research articles in the areas of algorithms, combinatorics, comparative genomics, algebraic statistics, molecular biology and evolution. He has taught a wide range of courses in mathematics, computational biology and genomics. He is a Fellow of the International Society of Computational Biology and has been awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, the Miller Professorship, and a Federal Laboratory Consortium award for the successful technology transfer of widely used sequence alignment software developed in his group.

RSVP and full schedule of events at https://www.iit.edu/applied-math/about/remembering-karl-menger.