The Fulbright College Department of Mathematical Sciences will present

"Geometry Through the School Years," a special lecture by Richard Askey, University of Wisconsin-Madison, at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 19, in room 132 of the Chemistry Building. The lecture is free and open to the public. Askey is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin. In addition to a book on "Special Functions" published in 1999 by Cambridge University Press, he has 155 publications in a wide variety of international journals.

Much has been written about teaching arithmetic to children. However, geometry has been ignored, yet it is the area of mathematics in which students do most poorly once they get beyond the stage of names for different figures. Askey will begin his talk with elementary school geometry. One essential difference between a triangle and a quadrilateral is that a triangle is rigid while a quadrilateral is not. Other topics will include why there is a factor of 1/2 in the formula for the area of a triangle but 1/3 in the formula for the volume of a pyramid.