NMC2010 - Beegerlezing

Beeger and the Beeger Lecture

Dr. N.G.W.H. Beeger was a Dutch mathematician, born in Utrecht, in 1884, who died in Amsterdam, in 1965. He wrote a Doctor's thesis on Dirichlet series (1916). Until his 65th year, he worked as a high school teacher, but in the evening hours he managed to produce about thirty papers and many reviews on elementary and algebraic number theory. One of his last publications was a table of prime numbers in the eleventh million. After his retirement as teacher he started an extensive correspondence with other mathematicians like Gloden, Golubev, Ferrier, Bianchini and Lehmer. Beeger had good contacts with the former Mathematical Centre in Amsterdam (now called Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, CWI) and he bequeathed part of his inheritance to this institute.

In 1989, the Board of Trustees of CWI established a biennial Beeger Lecture, to be funded by the returns of the Beeger legacy. Its purpose is to promote research and exchange of ideas in the field of Algorithmic and Computational Number Theory. As a rule, the Beeger Lecture is delivered during the yearly Congress of the Royal Dutch Mathematical Society (NMCxx). Until now, nine Beeger Lectures have been presented: by Carl Pomerance (1992, NMC28, Delft), Hugh Williams (1994, NMC30, Leiden), John Conway (1996, AMS BeNeLux Congress, Antwerpen), Hendrik Lenstra (1998, NMC34, Enschede), Peter Borwein (2000, ANTS IV, Leiden), Bjorn Poonen (2002, NMC38, Eindhoven), Manjul Bhargava (2004, NMC40, Tilburg), Manindra Agrawal (2006, NMC42, Delft), and Dan Bernstein (2008, NMC44 and 5ECM, Amsterdam).

An Advisory Committee for the Beeger Lecture consisting of Prof. J.K. Lenstra (Director of CWI), Prof. F. Beukers (Utrecht), Prof. H.W. Lenstra (Leiden), Prof. R. Tijdeman (Leiden), and Dr. H.J.J. te Riele (CWI, secretary of the Committee), has proposed Prof. Florian Luca from the Instituto de Matemáticas de la Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico as the 2010 Beeger Lecturer.

The Beeger Lecturer

Florian Luca (born 1969 in Romania) is full professor at the Instituto de Matemáticas UNAM, Morelia, Mexico. His research interests are abstract algebra, algebraic number theory, and Diophantine equations. He has been visiting professor at Dartmouth College, UAM Madrid, Williams College, Czech Academy of Sciences, University of Bielefeld, and Syracuse University. Over the period 1997--2010 his CV contains a list of 345 papers in number theory in refereed journals, and more than 150 conference talks. He has many joint papers with mathematicians originating from developing countries. He obtained a Young researcher award from UNAM in 2008, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship in 1998--1999.

The Beeger Lecture 2010: φ and σ, from Euler to Erdös