Beauty and Mathematics — Mathematicians’ Search for Order and Pattern. Dr. Wang will perform demonstrations to illustrate what he believes to be a higher purpose of mathematicians — to find order and pattern in virtually any situation, no matter how dis-ordered and random it may seem. This talk is suitable for anyone who has a knowledge of basic algebra.

Dr. Wang received his bachelors degree in math at Princeton frankwang1University (studying under Prof. Bernard Dwork) in 1986 and his PhD in pure math from MIT in 1991 (under the direction of Prof. Harold Stark). His thesis was in the area of algebraic number theory. At the age of 23 in 1988, he co-authored and had published a widely used high school calculus textbook. After receiving his PhD, Dr. Wang went on to run a textbook publishing company (Saxon Publishers), growing it from about 20 employees to major textbook publishing company with nearly 250 employees and $ 100 million in annual sales. In 2003, he stepped down as Chairman of the company, took a 90 % + paycut and became a public school teacher, teaching at the OK School of Science and Math and the University of Oklahoma. Recently, he has moved to the Dallas area to be close to DFW airport. (He has earned more than 1.5 million frequent miles on American Airlines.) His passion is for making the concepts of math understandable and interesting to students of all ages and abilities.