During the 2024–25 academic year, the Department of Mathematics hosted three distinguished colloquia that brought leading scholars to campus to share their work with the UF mathematical community.
Erdős Colloquium – Frank Calegari (University of Chicago)
On April 14, 2025, Professor Frank Calegari delivered the annual Erdős Colloquium, titled Two and a Half Millennia of Irrationality in Mathematics. Tracing the concept of irrational numbers from ancient Greece to modern number theory, Calegari offered a sweeping and accessible talk that resonated with faculty, students and guests alike. A prominent figure in the Langlands Program, Professor Calegari is known for his deep contributions to number theory, including recent groundbreaking work on the unbounded denominators conjecture. The Erdős Colloquium honors the legacy of Paul Erdős, who had a long-standing connection with UF mathematics.
Ramanujan Colloquium – Jeffrey Lagarias (University of Michigan)
The 2024–25 Ramanujan Colloquium was delivered by Professor Jeffrey Lagarias on March 5, 2025. In his talk, Euler’s Constant: Euler’s Work and Modern Developments, Lagarias explored the history and mystery of Euler’s constant, touching on its connections to prime number theory and the Riemann Hypothesis. Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2024, Lagarias also gave two additional seminar talks on the Collatz Problem and generalized factorials. The Ramanujan Colloquium is supported by Professor George Andrews and celebrates both the legacy of Srinivasa Ramanujan and UF’s strengths in related areas.
Ulam Colloquium – Gui-Qiang Chen (University of Oxford)
The Ulam Colloquium for 2024–25, held on January 15, 2025, featured Professor Gui-Qiang G. Chen, a leading expert in nonlinear partial differential equations. In his talk, Partial Differential Equations of Mixed Type – Analysis and Applications, Professor Chen highlighted new developments in addressing fundamental problems involving mixed elliptic-hyperbolic PDEs, including shock reflection and isometric embedding. Professor Chen was recently awarded the 2024 Pólya Prize by the London Mathematical Society.