Distinguished Undergraduate Lecture Series to feature connections between juggling and geometry
Dan Margalit, the Stevenson Professor and Department Chair of the Department of Mathematics at Vanderbilt University, will be the featured speaker for the 2026 edition of the Distinguished Undergraduate Lecture Series. The annual lecture, hosted by the MSU Department of Mathematics, will take place on Monday, March 23, in Room D101 of Wells Hall on the MSU campus.
The lecture, which begins at 4:10 p.m., will be preceded by a reception from 3:30-4:00 p.m. in Wells Hall, Room C204. Immediately following the talk, dinner will be served in Room D101 of Wells Hall.
Margalit will present a public talk titled “Juggling Numbers and Geometry.” According to his abstract, he will cover the following:
“One goal of mathematics is to describe the patterns we see in everyday phenomena, from weather to population growth to disease transmission and so on. Margalit will start his presentation by describing juggling — an important everyday phenomenon — using numbers, counting the different kinds of patterns, and creating new ones. From there connections will be made to different areas of mathematics, including group theory, topology, combinatorics, and number theory. The theme is that there are surprising connections all around – we just need to find them! This talk is meant to be accessible to everyone who is interested and curious.”
Margalit is a highly accomplished mathematician whose research expertise lies at the intersection of low-dimensional topology and geometric group theory, with a particular focus on mapping class groups of surfaces. He has earned significant recognition in the field for his groundbreaking research. He received the American Mathematical Society’s Levi L. Conant Prize in 2021, was inducted as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2019 and was named a Sloan Research Fellow in 2009.
Before joining Vanderbilt, Margalit was professor of mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to that, he was an assistant professor at Tufts and did his postdoctoral work at the University of Utah. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and his bachelor of science degree from Brown University.
For more information on the Distinguished Undergraduate Lecture Series, please visit the Department of Mathematics website.
About the Distinguished Undergraduate Lecture Series
The Department of Mathematics hosts annually a distinguished speaker known for their skillful exposition. The purpose of the Distinguished Undergraduate Lecture Series is to stimulate the interest of undergraduate students by showcasing the successes (and sometimes failures) of mathematics and illuminating the unexpected connections between mathematics and other spheres of the human experience.
Previous talks have covered topics as diverse as the beauty of fractals, solving popular music mysteries using some Fourier transform and statistics, and the quantifying of gerrymandering. Following each Lecture is a reception during which students are encouraged to interact with the speaker.
