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The Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
The Weizmann Institute of Science
announces the seventeenth
Chaim Leib Pekeris Memorial Lecture
to be delivered by
Professor Doron Zeilberger
Rutgers University
Sponsored by the Arthur and Rochelle
Belfer Institute of Mathematics and Computer
Science
at The Weizmann Institute of Science
The title:
...We have come a long way (or did we?):
A Redux of Pekeris' 1958 Computations on a 2010 Computer
on Wednesday, 30 June 2010, at 16:00
in the Dolfi and Lola Ebner Auditorium, on campus
A reception in honor of Prof. Zeilberger will be held after the lecture
Abstract
The most widely cited paper of Chaim Leib Pekeris z”l
is “Ground State of Two-Electron Atoms” published in Physical
Review in 1958. This ground-breaking work in computational theoretical
physics used ingenious state-of-the-art computations on the WEIZAC,
that necessitated very long and tedious human pre-processing before it
could be programmed.
Nowadays, computers, in addition to their obvious skill at
“number-crunching”,
are also very good at “symbol-crunching”. I will show that
not only the
computer part can be done much faster, but also the human part.
In that respect, we did indeed come a long way. Sadly, in another respect,
we didn't progress very far, and it is easy to come up with similar problems
that would, most probably, remain for ever intractable.
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