3709 Trousdale Parkway, Los Angeles, CA 90089

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Reception in the Cloisters of Mudd Hall - 3:30-4:00 pm


Mark Green
UCLA, Professor Emeritus & Distinguished Research Professor

Short abstract:
Mathematics has a way of turning out to be more useful than one might have expected. A case in point is Bayes' Theorem, a result about probabilities from the 18th century which has been used for applications as diverse as breaking  the German Enigma codes in World War II, quantifying the link between smoking and lung     cancer, problems in genomics and understanding the human brain.  In this talk, I will discuss the power of probabilistic thinking in general, explain Bayes' Theorem and give some examples of how it is used in machine learning in general, with some examples from clustering tumors to the automated discovering "topics" in a corpus of scientific papers.

 

Mark L. Green is the Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California at Los Angeles. He received his B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University. After teaching at the University of California at Berkeley and MIT, he came to UCLA as an assistant professor in 1975. He was a founding co-director and later Director of the NSF-funded Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics. Dr. Green’s research has taken him into different areas of mathematics: several complex variables, differential geometry, commutative algebra, Hodge theory, and algebraic geometry. He received an Alfred P. Sloan fellowship, was an invited speaker at the ICM in Berlin in 1998 and gave the Chern Medal Plenary Lecture at the ICM in Seoul in 2014.  He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Mathematical Society. Prof. Green served as vice-chair of the NRC study on The Mathematical Sciences in 2025 and serves on the Board of Governors of Transforming Postsecondary Education in Mathematics (TPSE-Math).

 

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  • Linh Pham

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