Photo by Andrew Frank
memoir, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! Lansky could relate to Feynman’s love of the natural world. “He was quite a character; he really attracted me to the whole world of physics.” At Brown, which he attended as an undergraduate, Lansky points to his ungraceful performance in the university physics lab. “I had a kind of notorious reputation for wrecking and destroying the lab when it came to doing experiments,” he says. “I guess I liked the cleaner aspects of physics, the mathematical aspects, the derivations, and the rigorous proving of formulas.”
Joshua Lansky
Shining Light on a Complex World: Joshua Lansky’s Mathematical Research By Andrew Frank, biology, ’11 Joshua Lansky is passionate about higher mathematics. Now a year into his recently awarded National Science Foundation grant, Lansky, along with American University mathematics professors Jeffery Adler and Jeffery Hakim, works to bring abstract fields of research together to gain a better understanding of the underlying laws of mathematics. Working together and sharing knowledge with experts in the field, Lansky is
expanding his own research and mathematical research done at American. Lansky began his career as a mathematician in physics. “In high school I started to really marvel at how much was known about the physical world, and how much of a role mathematics played in that knowledge,” he says. As a young man in college, Lansky drew inspiration from Richard Feynman’s quirky
Catalyst Winter 2011 10
During his time as an undergraduate, Lansky began work on what eventually led to his current research as an AU faculty member. “I was drawn into an area, representation theory, that has a lot of applications to physics, and right now I work in a part of representation theory that is more removed from physical applications.” At Brown, Lansky found himself surrounded with professors who excelled in algebra, number theory, and representation theory, and found interest in those subjects, drawn to studying complex symmetries and patterns. When Lansky entered Harvard for his PhD, he decided to do research under Benedict Gross, known for his work in the field of number theory. “I took this graduate number theory course with Benedict Gross, and it was the greatest course I had ever taken. The ideas just blew me away, and I knew that I wanted to do something involving number theory.” During his tenure at graduate school, Lansky worked to carry out unique computations in the fields of number theory and representation theory. “Something like Wolfram Mathematica