University of Maryland Distinguished Lecture Series

Dr. Billy Taylor
Jazz Composer & Performer
Author, Journalist & Broadcaster "My Life In Jazz" Thursday, 30 October 1997
4:30 PM
Grand Ballroom, Stamp Student Union

Dr. Freeman J. Dyson
Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton University "The Universe as a Home for Life" Wednesday, 19 November 1997
4:00 PM
Lecture Hall 1412, Physics Building

Dr. Deidre McCloskey
John F. Murray Professor of Economics
University of Iowa "Bourgeois Virtue" Monday, 9 February 1998
4:00 PM
Room 0220, Jimenez Hall

Dr. Ed Whitten
Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton University "The Quest for Superunification" Monday, 2 March 1998
4:00 PM
Lecture Hall 1412, Physics Building

Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich
Noted Author & Social Activist "Blood Rites" Thursday, 19 March 1998
4:00 PM
Room 2203, Art-Sociology Building

Dr. Ian Stewart
Professor of Mathematics
University of Warwick, UK "Life's Other Secret" Monday, 27 April 1998
4:00 PM
Lecture Hall 1412, Physics Building

Dr. Billy Taylor
Jazz Composer & Performer
Author, Journalist & Broadcaster

Billy Taylor, who has played with some of the great figures in jazz, has educated the public about the idiom he so loves. He has won the National Medal of Arts and two Peabody Awards for excellence in journalism. These prizes reflect his multifaceted life as a composer-performer and as a writer-broadcaster. Taylor, who can be seen regularly on the popular CBS program "Sunday Morning," is also a contributing arts correspondent, and he serves as artistic adviser for jazz to the Kennedy Center. His radio series "Bill Taylor's Jazz at the Kennedy Center" can be heard on National Public Radio stations nationwide.

Taylor wrote one of the great songs of the '60s, "I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to be Free," dealing with civil rights. More recently, the range and depth of Taylor's work in jazz has spawned many symphonic works for jazz piano. His "Theme and Variations" was commissioned by the Kennedy Center to be performed by the NSO under the direction of Leonard Slatkin. And in 1949 he wrote his first book - an instructional manual for Bebop piano. His most recent book is Jazz Piano--A Jazz History (Wm. C. Brown Publishers).

Dr. Freeman J. Dyson
Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton University

Professor Freeman Dyson is an eminent physicist who writes about physics and about science more generally for readers of Scientific American, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. As a young man, he worked in Operations Research for the Royal Air Force Bomber Command during World War II, dealing with survival techniques for bomber crews. He has received several important prizes and medals: tbe Danny Heineman Prize from the American Institute of Physics, the Lorentz Medal from the Royal Netherlands Academy, the Hughes Medal from the Royal Society London, and the Wolf Prize in Physics, among many others. He is the author of Disturbing the Universe (1979), which has been translated into seven languages, Weapons and Hope (1984), Origins of Life (1986), Infinite in All Directions (1988), From Eros to Gaia (1992), and Imagined Worlds (1977). He is celebrated for making science accessible to non- specialists and he has written intriguingly on ethics and scientific enterprises.

"The total disorder in the universe, as measured by the quantity that physicists call entropy, increases steadily over time. Also, the total order in the universe, as measured by the complexity and permanence of organized structures, also increases steadily over time." This paradox is the subject of Freeman Dyson's talk in the Distinguished Lecturer Series.

Dr. Deirdre McCloskey
John F. Murray Professor of Economics
University of Iowa

Professor Deirdre McCloskey is a leading economic historian with a great range of interests. She has held many distinguished fellowships and lectureships. She edited (with Roderick Floud) the three-volume, magisterial Economic History of England (Cambridge UP) and has written extensively about industry and trade in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, the history of international finance, and on many aspects of U.S. economic history. She has written much about the methods and rhetoric of economics, history and inquiry in general, writing sometimes for academic peers and often for more general audiences. In recent years, she has taken up issues of gender, writing as a "novice woman" about feminist economics, among other things.

"'Bourgeois virtue,' says McCloskey, is not an oxymoron. It is the trait of character manifested in the habitual action of a townsperson - as against the pagan aristocrat or the Christian peasant. Though we are all bourgeois now, the project of an ethics for the middle class was abandoned in the middle of the 19th century. It is not unthinkable: Adam Smith thought it, for example, though later thinkers in economics did not. It needs to be revived, and with it a new account, though in some ways old, of how we became rich and free."

Dr. Ed Whitten
Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton University

Life magazine calls him the sixth most influential baby-boomer and physicists speak his name in awed tones. Ed Witten is a world leader in theoretical research on superstrings. He has held a MacArthur Fellowship, and he has won several prestigious prizes (the Einstein Prize, the Dirac Medal, the Fields Medal, the Dannie Heineman Prize) and various honorary degrees. He is the author of hundreds of scientific articles.

"Superstring theories provide a framework in which the force of gravity may be united with the other three forces in nature: the weak, electromagnetic and strong forces. Recent progress has shown that the most promising superstring theories follow from a single theory. For the last generation, physicists have studied five string theories and one close cousin. Recently it has become clear that these five or six theories are different limiting cases of one theory which, though still scarcely understood, is the candidate for superunification of the forces of nature."

Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich
Noted Author & Social Activist

Dr. Ehrenreich has a Ph.D. in biology from the Rockefeller University and a B.A. from Reed College. She has received a Ford Foundation Award for Humanistic Perspectives on Contemporary Society in 1982 and shared the National Magazine Award for Excellence in Reporting in 1980. She was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1987-88, and has received honorary degrees from Reed College and the State University of New York at Old Westbury. She has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities in the United States, Canada, England and Holland and has appeared on the Today Show, Good Morning America, Nightline, Crossfire, The Phil Donahue Show, Canada AM and All Things Considered.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of numerous books, including The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed (Pantheon, 1990), Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, which was nominated for a National Book Critics' Award in 1989, and The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (Doubleday, 1983). Other books include The American Health Empire: Power, Profits and Politics (Random House, 1971), with John Ehrenreich; Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (The Feminist Press, 1972), For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women, with Dierdre English; Re-Making Love: the Feminization of Sex, with Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs (Doubleday, 1986); and The Mean Season: The Attack on Social Welfare, with Frances Fox Piven, Richard Cloward and Fred Block (Pantheon, 1987). Her feature articles, reviews, essays and humor have appeared in a wide range of publications including The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The Nation, The New Republic, Social Policy, Vogue, TV Guide and The Wall Street Journal. She has been an essayist for Time since 1990 and is a columnist for The Guardian in London.

Recently, she has published her eleventh book, Blood Rites: Origin and History of the Passions of War (Metropolitan Books, 1997). She examines why war remains one of the ecstatic activities of mankind, like sport or sex. The book, like most of Dr. Ehrenreich's work, takes a novel perspective, and it has been reviewed enthusiastically by mainstream military historians.

Dr. Ian Stewart
Professor of Mathematics
University of Warwick, UK

Ian Stewart was born in 1945, educated at Cambridge (BA in Mathematics) and Warwick (PhD) and is now a Professor of Mathematics at Warwick University and Gresham Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, London. He is Director of the Mathematics Awareness Centre at Warwick (MAC@W), and he has held visiting positions in Germany, New Zealand, and the USA. In 1995 he was awarded the Royal Society's Michael Faraday Medal for furthering public understanding of science, and he delivered the 1997 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures.

He is an active research mathematician with over 120 published papers, and his present field is the effects of symmetry on dynamics, with applications to pattern formation and chaos theory in areas including animal locomotion, fluid dynamics, mathematical biology, chemical reactions, electronic circuits, quality control of wire, and intelligent control of spring coiling machines. He takes a particular interest in problems that lie in the gaps between pure and applied mathematics.

He is perhaps best known for his popular science writing on mathematical themes. He contributes to many newspapers and magazines in the UK, Europe, and the USA; he writes the monthly "Mathematical Recreations" column of Scientific American; and he writes science fiction, including 18 short stories in Omni and Analog. He has also published over 60 books, including "The Collapse of Chaos," "Fearful Symmetry," and "Does God play Dice?" (which has sold 150,000 copies in English and has been translated into eleven other languages). Earlier books include three mathematical comic books in French: "Oh! Catastrophe!," "Les Fractals," and "Ah! Les Beaux Groupes." His most recent books are "Figments of Reality" (a sequel to "The Collapse of Chaos"), "The Magical Maze" (the book of the 1997 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures), and "Life's Other Secret," about mathematical patterns in living creatures. "Life's Other Secret" is that the mathematical laws of physics and chemistry control an organism's response to its genetic instructions.

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Dr. Billy Taylor Jazz Composer & Performer Author, Journalist & Broadcaster	*"My Life In Jazz"*	Thursday, 30 October 1997 4:30 PM Grand Ballroom, Stamp Student Union
Dr. Freeman J. Dyson Institute for Advanced Study Princeton University	*"The Universe as a Home for Life"*	Wednesday, 19 November 1997 4:00 PM Lecture Hall 1412, Physics Building
Dr. Deidre McCloskey John F. Murray Professor of Economics University of Iowa	*"Bourgeois Virtue"*	Monday, 9 February 1998 4:00 PM Room 0220, Jimenez Hall
Dr. Ed Whitten Institute for Advanced Study Princeton University	*"The Quest for Superunification"*	Monday, 2 March 1998 4:00 PM Lecture Hall 1412, Physics Building
Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich Noted Author & Social Activist	*"Blood Rites"*	Thursday, 19 March 1998 4:00 PM Room 2203, Art-Sociology Building
Dr. Ian Stewart Professor of Mathematics University of Warwick, UK	*"Life's Other Secret"*	Monday, 27 April 1998 4:00 PM Lecture Hall 1412, Physics Building

Dr. Billy Taylor Jazz Composer & Performer Author, Journalist & Broadcaster
	Billy Taylor, who has played with some of the great figures in jazz, has educated the public about the idiom he so loves. He has won the National Medal of Arts and two Peabody Awards for excellence in journalism. These prizes reflect his multifaceted life as a composer-performer and as a writer-broadcaster. Taylor, who can be seen regularly on the popular CBS program "Sunday Morning," is also a contributing arts correspondent, and he serves as artistic adviser for jazz to the Kennedy Center. His radio series "Bill Taylor's Jazz at the Kennedy Center" can be heard on National Public Radio stations nationwide.
Taylor wrote one of the great songs of the '60s, "I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to be Free," dealing with civil rights. More recently, the range and depth of Taylor's work in jazz has spawned many symphonic works for jazz piano. His "Theme and Variations" was commissioned by the Kennedy Center to be performed by the NSO under the direction of Leonard Slatkin. And in 1949 he wrote his first book - an instructional manual for Bebop piano. His most recent book is Jazz Piano--A Jazz History (Wm. C. Brown Publishers).

Dr. Freeman J. Dyson Institute for Advanced Study Princeton University
Professor Freeman Dyson is an eminent physicist who writes about physics and about science more generally for readers of Scientific American, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. As a young man, he worked in Operations Research for the Royal Air Force Bomber Command during World War II, dealing with survival techniques for bomber crews. He has received several important prizes and medals: tbe Danny Heineman Prize from the American Institute of Physics, the Lorentz Medal from the Royal Netherlands Academy, the Hughes Medal from the Royal Society London, and the Wolf Prize in Physics, among many others. He is the author of Disturbing the Universe (1979), which has been translated into seven languages, Weapons and Hope (1984), Origins of Life (1986), Infinite in All Directions (1988), From Eros to Gaia (1992), and Imagined Worlds (1977). He is celebrated for making science accessible to non- specialists and he has written intriguingly on ethics and scientific enterprises.
"The total disorder in the universe, as measured by the quantity that physicists call entropy, increases steadily over time. Also, the total order in the universe, as measured by the complexity and permanence of organized structures, also increases steadily over time." This paradox is the subject of Freeman Dyson's talk in the Distinguished Lecturer Series.

Dr. Deirdre McCloskey John F. Murray Professor of Economics University of Iowa
	Professor Deirdre McCloskey is a leading economic historian with a great range of interests. She has held many distinguished fellowships and lectureships. She edited (with Roderick Floud) the three-volume, magisterial Economic History of England (Cambridge UP) and has written extensively about industry and trade in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, the history of international finance, and on many aspects of U.S. economic history. She has written much about the methods and rhetoric of economics, history and inquiry in general, writing sometimes for academic peers and often for more general audiences. In recent years, she has taken up issues of gender, writing as a "novice woman" about feminist economics, among other things.
"'Bourgeois virtue,' says McCloskey, is not an oxymoron. It is the trait of character manifested in the habitual action of a townsperson - as against the pagan aristocrat or the Christian peasant. Though we are all bourgeois now, the project of an ethics for the middle class was abandoned in the middle of the 19th century. It is not unthinkable: Adam Smith thought it, for example, though later thinkers in economics did not. It needs to be revived, and with it a new account, though in some ways old, of how we became rich and free."

Dr. Ed Whitten Institute for Advanced Study Princeton University
Life magazine calls him the sixth most influential baby-boomer and physicists speak his name in awed tones. Ed Witten is a world leader in theoretical research on superstrings. He has held a MacArthur Fellowship, and he has won several prestigious prizes (the Einstein Prize, the Dirac Medal, the Fields Medal, the Dannie Heineman Prize) and various honorary degrees. He is the author of hundreds of scientific articles.
"Superstring theories provide a framework in which the force of gravity may be united with the other three forces in nature: the weak, electromagnetic and strong forces. Recent progress has shown that the most promising superstring theories follow from a single theory. For the last generation, physicists have studied five string theories and one close cousin. Recently it has become clear that these five or six theories are different limiting cases of one theory which, though still scarcely understood, is the candidate for superunification of the forces of nature."

Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich Noted Author & Social Activist
	Dr. Ehrenreich has a Ph.D. in biology from the Rockefeller University and a B.A. from Reed College. She has received a Ford Foundation Award for Humanistic Perspectives on Contemporary Society in 1982 and shared the National Magazine Award for Excellence in Reporting in 1980. She was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1987-88, and has received honorary degrees from Reed College and the State University of New York at Old Westbury. She has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities in the United States, Canada, England and Holland and has appeared on the Today Show, Good Morning America, Nightline, Crossfire, The Phil Donahue Show, Canada AM and All Things Considered.
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of numerous books, including The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed (Pantheon, 1990), Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, which was nominated for a National Book Critics' Award in 1989, and The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (Doubleday, 1983). Other books include The American Health Empire: Power, Profits and Politics (Random House, 1971), with John Ehrenreich; Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (The Feminist Press, 1972), For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women, with Dierdre English; Re-Making Love: the Feminization of Sex, with Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs (Doubleday, 1986); and The Mean Season: The Attack on Social Welfare, with Frances Fox Piven, Richard Cloward and Fred Block (Pantheon, 1987). Her feature articles, reviews, essays and humor have appeared in a wide range of publications including The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The Nation, The New Republic, Social Policy, Vogue, TV Guide and The Wall Street Journal. She has been an essayist for Time since 1990 and is a columnist for The Guardian in London.
	Recently, she has published her eleventh book, Blood Rites: Origin and History of the Passions of War (Metropolitan Books, 1997). She examines why war remains one of the ecstatic activities of mankind, like sport or sex. The book, like most of Dr. Ehrenreich's work, takes a novel perspective, and it has been reviewed enthusiastically by mainstream military historians.

Dr. Ian Stewart Professor of Mathematics University of Warwick, UK
Ian Stewart was born in 1945, educated at Cambridge (BA in Mathematics) and Warwick (PhD) and is now a Professor of Mathematics at Warwick University and Gresham Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, London. He is Director of the Mathematics Awareness Centre at Warwick (MAC@W), and he has held visiting positions in Germany, New Zealand, and the USA. In 1995 he was awarded the Royal Society's Michael Faraday Medal for furthering public understanding of science, and he delivered the 1997 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures.
He is an active research mathematician with over 120 published papers, and his present field is the effects of symmetry on dynamics, with applications to pattern formation and chaos theory in areas including animal locomotion, fluid dynamics, mathematical biology, chemical reactions, electronic circuits, quality control of wire, and intelligent control of spring coiling machines. He takes a particular interest in problems that lie in the gaps between pure and applied mathematics.
He is perhaps best known for his popular science writing on mathematical themes. He contributes to many newspapers and magazines in the UK, Europe, and the USA; he writes the monthly "Mathematical Recreations" column of Scientific American; and he writes science fiction, including 18 short stories in Omni and Analog. He has also published over 60 books, including "The Collapse of Chaos," "Fearful Symmetry," and "Does God play Dice?" (which has sold 150,000 copies in English and has been translated into eleven other languages). Earlier books include three mathematical comic books in French: "Oh! Catastrophe!," "Les Fractals," and "Ah! Les Beaux Groupes." His most recent books are "Figments of Reality" (a sequel to "The Collapse of Chaos"), "The Magical Maze" (the book of the 1997 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures), and "Life's Other Secret," about mathematical patterns in living creatures. *"Life's Other Secret"* is that the mathematical laws of physics and chemistry control an organism's response to its genetic instructions.