Roever Lectures

The William H. Roever Lectures in Geometry were established in 1982 by his sons William A. and Frederick H. Roever, and members of their families, as a lasting memorial to their father.

After receiving a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Washington University in 1897, William H. Roever studied mathematics at Harvard University, where he received the Ph.D. in 1906. After two years of teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he returned to Washington University in 1908. There he spent his entire career, serving as chairman of the Department of Mathematics and Astronomy from 1932 until his retirement in 1945.

Professor Roever published over 40 articles and several books, nearly all in his specialty, descriptive geometry. He served on the council of the American Mathematical Society and on the editorial board of the Mathematical Association of America and was a member of the Mathematical Societies of Italy and Germany. His rich and fruitful professional life remains an important example to his Department.

Upcoming Events

Visit our Events listing to see forthcoming Roever Lectures and other events from the Department of Mathematics & Statistics.

Events Listing

Past Lectures

Tye Lidman, Associate Professor of Mathematics, North Carolina State University; 2022.

Paul Baum, Evan Pugh University Professor, Penn State University; 2019.

Tom Mrowka, Professor of Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; 2019.

Alexander Barvinok, Professor of Mathematics, University of Michigan; August 31,2017.

Imre Barany, Professor of Mathematics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences & University College-London; August 29, 2017.

Ronald Douglas, Distinguished Professor of Mathematics, Texas A&M; February 4, 2016.

Xiaojun Huang, Distinguished Professor of Mathematics, Rutgers University at New Brunswick; April 2, 2015.

Fraydoun Rezakhanlou, Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley;  Symplectic Capacity, Conformal Modulus and Fluid Mechanics;  March 14, 2013.  

Tobias Colding from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; April 12, 2012. 

Yoshihiko Mitsumatsu from Chuo University, Tokyo, Japan; A geometric introduction to incompressible fluid motions on manifolds; April 19, 2012.

Leonid Polterovich from the Department of Mathematics at the University of Chicago;  Inside the Poisson bracket: some function-theoretic aspects of symplectic geometry; May 2, 2011. 

Nicolai Reshetikhin from the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley; Understanding random surfaces; December 2, 2010.

Simon Brendle from the Department of Mathematics at Stanford University; April 29-30, 2010.

Robert Osserman from the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute; An inverse problem in the calculus of variations, tube-like domains, and compressed catenaries; March 24-25, 2009.

Yakov Eliashberg from Stanford University; Symplectic geometry of affine complex manifolds; April 10-11, 2008.

John Morgan from Columbia University & Gang Tian from Princeton University; The Poincare Conjecture and the Geometrization Conjecture; October 19 - 20, 2007. 

Brian White from Stanford University; April 20, 2006.

Alan Weinstein from University of California, Berkeley; Morita equivalence in algebra and geometry; February 24, 2005.

Peter Ozsvath from Columbia University & IAS; Holomorphic Disks and Low-dimensional Topology; March 29 - May 1, 2004.

Misha Kapovich from University of Utah; Symmetric spaces, buildings, and nonpositive curvature; March 19-21, 2003.

Sun-Yung Alice Chang from Princeton University; Conformal invariant operators and elliptic equations in conformal geometry; March 25, 2002.

Grigorii Margulis from Yale University; Quantitative Oppenheim conjecture; February 28, 2002.

Raoul Bott from Harvard University, Alberto Candel from California State University at Northridge, John Cantwell from Saint Louis University, Thomas E. Cecil from College of the Holy Cross, James L. Heitsch from University of Illinois Chicago, Steven Hurder from University of Illinois Chicago, and Paul A. Schweitzer from Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; April 7-8, 2001.

Takashi Tsuboi from University of Tokyo and Stanford University; Transverse intersection of foliations in 3-manifolds; October 21, 1999.

Jeff Cheeger from New York University, Courant Institute; Calculus on metric measure spaces; September 23, 1999.

Ulrich Pinkall from Technische Universitat, Berlin; Quaternionic algebraic geometry and differential geometry of surfaces; February 25, 1999.

Raghavan Narasimhan from University of Chicago; Bernstein-Markov type inequalities for families of analytic functions; February 4, 1999.

Chuu-Lian Terng from Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; April 16, 1998.

Michael Wolf from Rice University; March 12, 1998.

Christopher B. Croke from University of Pennsylvania; November 14, 1996.

Karsten Grove from University of Maryland; April 4, 1996.

Robert L. Bryant from University of North Carolina; February 23, 1995.

Raoul Bott from Harvard University; March 21, 1994.

Thomas E. Cecil from College of the Holy Cross; April 1, 1993.

Robert C. Hartshorne from University of California, Berkeley; February 25, 1992.

Patrick Eberlein from University of North Carolina; March 11-15, 1991.

William Fulton from University of Chicago; June 5-10, 1989.

John W. Morgan from Columbia University; February 15-19, 1988.

Nicolaas H. Kuiper from Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques, France; January 20-24, 1986.

I. M. Singer from Massachusetts Institute of Technology; January 14-18, 1985.

Phillip A. Griffiths from Harvard University; January 9-13, 1984.

John Milnor from Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; January 10-14, 1983.