UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Laura DeMarco, professor of mathematics in residence at Harvard University, will present the 2026 Russell E. Marker Lectures in Mathematics, March 2-4 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 “The (Algebraic) Geometry of the Mandelbrot Set,” at 6 p.m. Monday, March 2, as well as more-specialized lectures: “Elliptic Curves, Periodic Points, and Bifurcations” at 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 3, and “From Abelian Varieties to Dynamical Rigidity: A Unifying Conjecture” at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 4.
About the speaker
Laura DeMarco is a professor of mathematics at Harvard University and a Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her research is focused on algebraic dynamical systems, with an emphasis on notions of stability and bifurcation. DeMarco received a doctorate from Harvard in 2002. She held faculty positions at the University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Northwestern University before returning to Harvard in 2020. Prizes include the Alexanderson Award from the American Institute of Mathematics in 2020, the Satter Prize from the American Mathematical Society in 2017, and the Frontiers of Science Award from the International Congress of Basic Science in Beijing in 2024. Laura DeMarco is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.
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.