News & Events

“The Great Pi vs. E Debate” – A comical yet serious math debate to be staged at UNC Asheville

March 13, 2013

A comical yet serious presentation – "The Great Pi vs. E Debate" – will be staged at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 28, in UNC Asheville's Lipinsky Auditorium. The event, UNC Asheville's annual Parsons Lecture, showcases eminent scholars explaining math theories and problems in innovative ways understood by non-mathematicians.

"The Great Pi vs. E Debate" features Colin Adams and Thomas Garrity, both professors of mathematics at Williams College in Massachusetts.

Adams writes a humorous column for the Mathematical Intelligencer Journal, is author of "The Knot Book" (American Mathematical Society, 2004) and received the Deborah and Franklin Pepper Haimo Distinguished Teaching Award from the Mathematical Association of America.

Garrity is the author of "All the Mathematics you Missed (But Need to Know for Graduate School" (Cambridge University Press, 2002), a technical text covering topics such as vector calculus, probability theory, abstract algebra and numerous other subfields of mathematics.

"The Great Pi vs. E Debate" is free and open to the public, made possible by an endowment from an alumnus in honor of UNC Asheville Professor Emeritus Joe Parsons, who served in the Mathematics Department from 1952 to 1980.

For more information, call 828.251.6556.