Language and Learning

Stephen Smale: UC Berkeley, Department of Mathematics

Wednesday, October 23, 2002
4:00pm
E25-401

Bio - Stephen Smale was awarded a Fields Medal at the International Congress at Moscow in 1966 for his work on the generalized Poincare conjecture. Another area in which Smale has made a substantial contribution is in Morse theory. A further discovery of Smale relates to strange attractors. In the late 1960's, he modeled physical processes by dynamical systems, opening new lines of inquiry. The n-body problem and electric circuit theory were among the applications that Smale framed in the language of dynamical systems. For much of the 70's, Steve focused on economics, injecting topology and dynamics into the study of general economic equilibia. Smale's recent work has been on theoretical computer science. Even more recently, he has started to work inthe area of statistical learning. A long paper co-authored with F. Cucker entitled, "On the Mathematical Foundations of Learning," has recently appeared in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society.