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The Annual William Marshall Bullitt Lecture
2013 BULLITT LECTURE
Breaking Driver's License Codes
Joseph A. Gallian
University of Minnesota Duluth
Thursday, March 21st, 2013
6:30pm -7:30pm,
Middleton Auditorium
Strickler 101
University of Louisville
Abstract:
Many states use complicated algorithms or formulas to assign driver's license
numbers but keep the method confidential. Just for the fun of it, I attempted
to figure out how the states code their license numbers. In this talk I will
discuss how I was able to break the code for Minnesota, Illinois and Missouri.
The talk illustrates an important problem-solving technique used by scientists
but is not emphasized in mathematics classes. It also teaches the lesson
that sometimes things done just for the sake of curiosity can have applications.
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
for more information, contact math@louisville.edu or call (502) 852-6826
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(click on image to download PDF of the poster)
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There is also a Bullitt Lecture in Physics.
The Mathematics Department’s Bullitt Lecture is a free, public lecture
that has brought to Louisville each year, beginning in 1993, a
distinguished mathematician to speak to 200-500 audience members about
important and cutting-edge mathematics. Ronald Graham, former Chief
Scientist at AT&T, and Indiana University College Professor of
Cognitive Science and Computer Science, author and computer scientist
Douglas R. Hofstadter (author of Gödel, Escher, Bach) are
former Bullitt Lecturers. The emphasis has been drawing people from the
outside academia. Talented high school students, area
professionals, and other parties interested in the impact and
excitement that mathematics has generated, especially in the last
decade, have attended the Bullitt Lecture in surprisingly large numbers.
The Lecture is endowed through a grant from the family of William
Marshall Bullitt, the Solicitor General of the United Stated under
President William Howard Taft. The first Bullitt lecture was given by Jerry King of Lehigh University (a native Kentuckian, UK Ph.D) on the subject of his then popular book "The Art of Mathematics," Plenum Press, NY and London, 1992. It took place on April 5, 1993.
The second lecture was given by Professor Fred Rickey, one of the leading American historians of mathematics who was then at Bowling Green University (and is now at the United States Military Academy at West Point), on the then popular topic of the history of Fermat's Last Theorem. Recall that Andrew Wiles had announced his proof of FLT in the summer of 1993. Professor Rickey's talk took place in April of 1994.
Paul
Humke gave the third lecture in 1995 on visualizing the 4th
dimension. After 1995, the Bullitt Lecture was advertised via
posters shown below.
Click on photo to download PDF file containing the poster.
(some of these files are large, > 1mb)
William
Marshall Bullitt, the Solicitor General of the United Stated under
President William Howard Taft, was a Louisville
native and an 1894 Princeton graduate. He received his law degree
from the University of Louisville. Bullitt is descended from one of the
most prominent Kentucky families- five Kentucky counties bear the name
of his direct ancestors.
Bullitt was an authority on insurance law and wrote a number of
important pamphlets in actuarial mathematics. He was a personal
friend of a number of important figures in twentieth-century
mathematics, including G.D. Birkhoff, G.H. Hardy, and Albert
Einstein.
The Bullitt family had already compiled collections of rare books in
history, horticulture, and other field when William Marshall Bullitt
decided to pursue acquisitions of rare mathematical editions. Bullitt
began by seeking the aid of mathematicians and historians of
mathematics in determining a list of ``25 Greatest Mathematicians
(Excluding all Living Mathematicians)”. Prior to World War II,
Bullitt and his wife traveled extensively in Europe; his cousin,
William Christian Bullitt, was the American Ambassador to France at the
time. Bullitt put together a magnificent collection of rare and
significant mathematics. “Strangely enough, anyone wishing to
write about Galois in Paris would do well to journey to Louisville,
Kentucky,” wrote Leopold Infeld, author of Whom the Gods Love, a
fictionalized biography of the celebrated French mathematician Evariste
Galois. A well-written account of Bullitt and his efforts to obtain rare mathematics manuscripts is given in ``William
Marshall Bullitt and His Amazing Mathematical Collection”, by Richard
M. Davitt (Professor of Mathematics at the University of Louisville),
in The Mathematical Intelligencer, Vol. 11, No. 4, 1989.
In 1958, Bullitt’s wife gave the entire mathematics collection and
related correspondence to the University of Louisville, where today it
is the William Marshall Bullitt Mathematical Collection. Visitors from
around the world visit the Collection. Members of the Bullitt
family are frequent Lecture attendees. The mathematics
community—indeed, the entire Louisville community—gratefully and gladly
acknowledges the debt to the family for the inestimable contribution
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