About the Excelsior Lecturer
Jill Catherine Pipher is the 2016 Excelsior Lecturer. She is the past-president of the Association of Women in Mathematics (AWM, 2011-2013), and she is the first director of the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM, 2011-), an NSF-funded mathematics institute based in Providence, RI.
She is currently the Elisha Benjamin Andrews Professor of Mathematics at Brown University. She received a B.A. from UCLA in 1979 and a Ph.D. from UCLA in 1985 under the direction of John B. Garnett. She taught at the University of Chicago (1985-1990) before taking a position at Brown in 1990, where she served as chair of the Mathematics Department from 2005 to 2008.
Pipher's work has been in harmonic analysis, Fourier analysis, partial differential equations, and cryptography. She has published more than 50 research articles and has coauthored a textbook on cryptography. Further information can be found on her website, linked here.
The 2016 Excelsior Lectures
General Lecture: An overview of the theory of elliptic/parabolic boundary value problems
I will describe and motivate a decades-long program that aims to understand when we can solve boundary value problems under minimal smoothness assumptions on either the coefficients of the operator, or on the domain in which it is defined.
Second Lecture: Recent progress in elliptic/parabolic boundary value problems
This will be a more technical introduction to some of the main tools and ideas that have advanced the program.