The  Clay–Mahler  Lecture Tour

In 2009 the Australian Mathematical Society has partnered with the Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) to produce the Clay–Mahler Lecture Tour, a combination of lectures in the Clay and Mahler series.

The CMI is a privately endowed research institute based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the goal of expanding and disseminating mathematical knowledge. The Mahler Lectures, organised every two years by the Australian Mathematical Society and supported by the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute (AMSI), honour the memory of the German-born number theorist Kurt Mahler, who spent the last 25 years of his life at the Australian National University. By combining the Mahler lectures with part of the CMI's renown lecture program the Australian Mathematical Society and AMSI have been able to bring to Australia not one, not two, but three outstanding mathematicians --- Australia's own Terry Tao (the designated Clay–Mahler lecturer), and Mohammed Abouzaid and Danny Calegari. Both Mohammed and Danny are Clay lecturers. Like Terry, Danny is making a visit home; he graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1994. Terry graduated from Flinders two years earlier.

Terry kicked off the Clay–Mahler series at 6.00 pm on 31 August, with an engaging, multifaceted talk at the University of Melbourne on "Mathematical research and the internet". There will be two more talks in Melbourne in the Clay-Mahler series: on Tuesday 1 September, at 3.30 pm at RMIT, on "Compressed Sensing", and on Wednesday 2 September, at 2.30pm at Monash University, on "Discrete Random Matrices". Then Terry departs for other Australian cities, travelling the country until October and lecturing on an exceptional variety of mathematical topics. Abouzaid and Calegari will join him in this remarkable tour; in fact, Calegari has been hard at it since late July. You can find out more at http://www.austms.org.au/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=61

Terry, of course, is his usual extraordinary self, touching on a multitude of topics at once as he draws together the many connections he needs to make his points and explain the mysteries that the mathematical sciences are uncovering today. The internet, he points out, enables mathematicians to learn much more about other fields (both inside and outside mathematics) than was ever possible before. True to form, his talk on "Mathematical research and the internet" was available on his blog (see http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/mathematical-research-and-the-internet/)
for several days before he delivered it in Melbourne, and before its Melbourne debut he revised it "in view of feedback from this blog and elsewhere".

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*Peter Hall is Professor of Statistics at the University of Melbourne.