Jayadev Athreya (Director of the University of Washington's Experimental Mathematics Lab) will speak in the Oregon Distinguished Mathematics Lectures for Students series.  The talk will be broadly accessible, and all are welcome.

Talk abstract: We start by trying to understand how a billiard ball bounces around a square table, or equivalently, how a laser beam can illuminate a mirrored room. We show how this relates to playing Pac-Man, and how this picture generalizes to rooms of other shapes. This is a story that mathematicians have been thinking about for a long time, and it's recently been a big part of the work of Maryam Mirzakhani, recent winner of the Fields Medal.