The Mahler Lectureship
Professor Kurt Mahler was one of the major characters of Australian mathematics from his arrival in this country in the 1960s, until his death in 1988. The Society was a beneficiary under the will of Professor Mahler. The money from this bequest has been used to set up a visiting lectureship in his honour.
(Photo from Encyclopedia of Australian Science.)
CARMA, at the University of Newcastle, maintains a digital archive of Mahler's published papers, spanning 1927–1991. Also see the article: “The legacy of Kurt Mahler”.
The Mahler Lectureship is awarded every two years to a distinguished mathematician who preferably works in an area of mathematics associated with the work of Professor Mahler. It is usually expected that the Lecturer will speak at one of the main Society Conferences and visit as many universities as can be reasonably managed.
The Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute (AMSI) has been backing the tour of the Society's Mahler Lecturer since 2005. AMSI provides financial and logistic support and arranges outreach opportunities to the public and schools during the tour. The Institute has similar arrangements with both ANZIAM and SSAI.
| Year | Lecturer |
| 1991 | John Coates (biography) |
| 1993 | Don Zagier |
| 1995 | Michel Mendes France |
| 1997 | Peter Hilton |
| 1999 | John H Conway (biography) |
| 2001 | Robin Thomas |
| 2003 | Hendrik Lenstra (biography) |
| 2005 | Bruce Berndt |
| 2007 | Mark Kisin |
| 2009* | Terence Tao |
| 2011 | Peter Sarnak (poster, talks) |
| 2013 | Akshay Venkatesh (AMSI, talks) |
| 2015 | Manjul Bhargava (AMSI) | 2017–2018 | Ivan Corwin |
| 2019 | Holly Krieger (AMSI) |
*In 2009 the lectureship was organized in partnership with the Clay Mathematics Institute, so the lecture tour that year was known as the Clay–Mahler lectures.
Links to Peter Sarnak’s 2011 AMSI–Mahler lectures:
- Number Theory and the Circle Packings of Apollonius (4.6 Mb)
- Thin Groups and the Affine Sieve (2.7 Mb)
- Zeros and Nodal Lines of Modular Forms (2.4 Mb)
- Randomness in Number Theory (2.3 Mb)
- Mobius Randomness and Dynamics (195 Kb)
- Horocycle Flow at Prime Times (291 Kb)
- Chaos, Quantum Mechanics and Number Theory (14.8 Mb)
Links to Terry Tao’s 2009 Clay–Mahler lectures:
- Behrend lecture: Mathematical research and the internet
- Cosmic Distance Ladder
- Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture
- Structure and randomness in the prime numbers
- Compressed Sensing
- Discrete Random Matrices
- Recent progress in additive prime number theory
- Recent progress on the Kakeya conjecture
- links to photos, news clippings, etc. at AMSI's site
