Special Event In Memory of Martin Davis

Time and Location:

Speaker:

Simple to state and awe-inspiring in its implications, Hilbert's Tenth Problem (H10) was for Martin Davis "a lifelong obsession".  When he first encountered the problem as an undergraduate at City College in the 1940s, H10 appeared to reside firmly in the territory of number theory.  So when Davis suggested, in his 1950 PhD thesis, that H10 could have deep connections to then-new ideas in mathematical logic, he was greeted with skepticism.  But his suggestion proved correct and opened a path for the resolution of H10 in 1970.  In my talk I will provide a glimpse into the beauty and resonance of H10, as well as into the remarkable personality of Martin Davis.

Speaker Bio: Allyn Jackson is a freelance writer specializing in mathematics and computer science.  Previously she worked at the American Mathematical Society, where she was Senior Writer and Deputy Editor of the news journal Notices of the AMS.  She interviewed Martin Davis for the Notices (May 2008) and for the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (26 August 2021).  Hilbert's Tenth Problem was a theme in her article "Dear Julia, Dear Yuri: A mathematical correspondence", published in 2022 in Celebratio Mathematica. Her article "Psychological Fidelity", about the life of Martin Davis's mentor Emil L. Post, appeared in Inference: International Review of Science (October 2018).