About the speaker:

Professor Yang Wang is Dean of Science and chair professor of mathematics in the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. An internationally respected mathematician, his research spans both pure and applied mathematics, including applied harmonic analysis, signal processing, fractal geometry, tiling and the application of machine learning to various practical applications. He is on the editorial board of some of the top journals in his fields, such as Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis, Advances in Computational Math etc.

Professor Wang received his BS in mathematics from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1983 and his PhD in mathematics from Harvard University in 1990. He was a professor at Georgia Tech until 2006, when he became department head in Michigan State University. He has also served as a program director in the US National Science Foundation, and an active member of the mathematical community in promoting outreach and international exchange.

Abstract:

There have been no shortages of controversies in literature, from old questions such as whether Cao Xueqin wrote all 120 chapters of "Dreams of Red Chamber", widely known as the greatest work of Chinese literature, to new questions such as whether Obama actually wrote his autobiography "Dreams From My Father". For mathematicians, it is interesting to ask whether mathematics can be used to settle these controversies. In this talk, I will give an overview on how mathematics can be applied to analyze the "style" of an author and the related field of study called "stylometry". I will show that mathematics can be used to almost definitively settle many such controversies.