USNA Announces 31st Annual Michelson Memorial Lecture

The Naval Academy Division of Mathematics and Science will host the 31st annual Michelson Memorial Lecture Oct. 5 at 7:15 p.m. in Mahan Hall. Dr. Bernd Sturmfels, professor of mathematics, statistics, and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley and a leading experimentalist among mathematicians will speak on “Tropical Mathematics.” The Michelson Memorial Lecture series is supported by the Naval Academy Class of 1969, and is open to the public.

The Michelson Memorial Lecture celebrates the accomplishments of Albert Abraham Michelson, America’s first Nobel Laureate in science and the academy’s most scientifically accomplished graduate. Michelson’s experiments on the measurement of the speed of light were initiated while he was a military instructor at the U.S. Naval Academy and contributed to his selection as the 1907 Nobel Laureate in Physics. On the Naval Academy campus, the building named after Michelson is home to academic classrooms and scientific laboratories and hosts an outdoor display commemorating Michel-son’s speed of light measurements.