Prof. William Barker to Deliver Wing Inaugural Lecture Apr. 7

Story posted April 03, 2009

Wm_Barker.jpg
William H. Barker.

William H. Barker, appointed the Isaac Henry Wing Professor of Mathematics, will discuss his research in a talk titled "Twist, Flip, Glide Movement, Symmetry, and the Meaning of Geometry," at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 7, 2009, in Lancaster Lounge, Moulton Union.

In his talk, Barker will describe the transformational approach to geometry that is the heart of his book Continuous Symmetry (co-authored with Roger Howe of Yale University).

William Barker joined the Bowdoin faculty in 1975. His primary research and professional activities began with analysis and representation of Lie groups, continued with the efforts of the previous decade to reform the instruction of calculus, and returned to the foundations of Lie theory via its roots in classical and transformational geometry.

His work in geometry has been centered on coauthoring, with Howe, a two-volume undergraduate textbook, Continuous Symmetry, developing geometry from the transformational viewpoint of Felix Klein's Erlanger Programm. The first volume was published in 2007; the second is currently in preparation.

After completing his B.A. in mathematics at Harpur College (Binghamton University) in 1968, Barker earned his Ph.D. at M.I.T. in 1973, writing a thesis under the guidance of Sigurdur Helgason in analysis on Lie groups. He then served for two years as a John Wesley Young Research Instructor at Dartmouth College before joining the Bowdoin faculty.

Since that time Barker has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Utah (1982-1983), a member of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (1987-1988), and a visiting professor at Yale University (1996-1997). Bill had several National Science Foundation grants, four of which supported his calculus reform activities, including the construction of the first two mathematics computer laboratories at Bowdoin.

He has also been active with the Mathematical Association of America, including serving as the chair of its Curriculum Foundations Project and as a member of the writing team for the CUPM's Curriculum Guide 2004. At Bowdoin, Barker served as chair of the Department of Mathematics from 2001 to 2004.

The Isaac Henry Wing Professor of Mathematics, Established 1906
Ill health forced Isaac Henry Wing, an Augusta, Maine, native, to leave Bowdoin before his graduation with the Class of 1856. He went west, settled in Hudson, Wisconsin, and through the ownership of timberlands gradually built a fortune in his adopted state. Bowdoin awarded him the A.B., and forty years later he received an honorary A.M. degree.

Wing began work in Wisconsin as an accountant, read law, and was admitted to the bar in 1860; he became police judge of Hudson the following year. In the spring of 1861, he became the first Wisconsin man to answer President Lincoln's call to arms. He served as a first lieutenant in the 4th Wisconsin Volunteers before his health forced him to retire. Returning to Wisconsin, Wing worked first as a county clerk in Croix, then as a federal commissioner appraising Indian reservations, and, in 1872, as receiver of the U.S. Land Office in Bayfield. During these years he purchased land that appreciated rapidly in value. At his death in 1907, his estate was worth nearly one million dollars.

In 1906 he gave Bowdoin $50,000 to endow a chair in mathematics. His reasons for making the gift, he told President Hyde, were "to aid the coming...students in the prosecution of those studies in which my own youth especially delighted...In a sense, I feel myself as now having a vested interest in what Bowdoin's mathematicians may accomplish in the indefinite future."

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