UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Tadashi Tokieda, professor of mathematics at Stanford University, will present the 2025 Russell E. Marker Lectures in Mathematics, Nov. 10-12 in 114 McAllister Building, on the Penn State University Park campus. These free public lectures are sponsored by the Penn State Eberly College of Science.
The series includes a lecture intended for a general audience, titled “A World From a Sheet of Paper,” at 6 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 10, as well as three additional lectures: “How to Use Quantum Mechanics, Part 1” at 3 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 11; “How to Use Quantum Mechanics, Part 2” at 11 a.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 12; and “A Magic Show” at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 12.
About the speaker
Tadashi Tokieda is a professor of mathematics at Stanford University. He grew up as a painter in Japan, became a classical philologist (not to be confused with philosopher), worked a little as a plumber in France, and — after earning his doctoral degree in pure mathematics from Princeton — has been an applied mathematician around the world. He is active in outreach, for example via the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences and the YouTube channel Numberphile. He also gave public lectures at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018 and 2022 and will speak at ICM 2026.
About the Marker Lectures
The Marker Lectures were established in 1984 through a gift from the late Russell Earl Marker, professor emeritus of organic chemistry at Penn State, whose pioneering synthetic methods revolutionized the steroid hormone industry and opened the door to the current era of hormone therapies, including the birth control pill.
The Marker endowment allows the Penn State Eberly College of Science to present annual Marker Lectures in astronomy and astrophysics, the chemical sciences, evolutionary biology, genetic engineering, the mathematical sciences, and the physical sciences.