Math lecture to explain "How the World Fits Together"

Lorenzo Sadun of the University of Texas at Austin will talk about how the world fits together at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 12, in the Reynolds Center Auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the public.

How the world fits together addresses a central paradox in science, which is that very simple things give rise to complex behavior, said Chaim Goodman-Strauss, professor and chair of the department of mathematics in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.

Goodman-Strauss gives an example of atoms, which are simple, giving rise to chemistry, which is more complex. The complexity continues to grow in layers.

"Chemicals have rich and complex behaviors that give us the structure of cells, and from cells we get tissues, from tissues we get organs, from organs we get animals and people, and from people we develop societies," he said. Mathematicians and others try to understand how these simply organized structures can give rise to complex behavior.

"These ideas are all pretty new," Goodman-Strauss said, stemming back around 50 years. At that time, scientists believed that everything either fit in an order or exhibited random behavior, and that nothing was possible in between.

"But when you look at the world around you, you realize that this theory is too simplistic," Goodman-Strauss said.

The concept Sadun will speak about has great importance in science today. In 1982, a chemist named Dan Shechtmen discovered atoms in a crystal that were packed in a pattern that could not be repeated. While his results at the time were received with skepticism, they eventually forced scientists to reconsider the very nature of matter, and Shechtmen received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2011.

For more information, please call the mathematics department at 575-3351.