Faculty Lecture Series: Ralph Morrison

Associate Professor of Mathematics Ralph Morrison presents “Bézout’s Theorem, Algebraic and Tropical” as part of the spring 2025 Faculty Lecture Series. Lectures will begin at 4:15 p.m. and this talk will take place in Wege Auditorium (TCL 123). Students, faculty, staff, community members – all are welcome!

Two lines in the plane intersect in one point, and a line and a circle intersect in two points.  Except when they don’t!  What if the two lines are parallel?  Or what if you pick the same line twice?  Or what if the line barely touches the circle, or doesn’t touch it at all?  In this talk we’ll build up the machinery to study these sorts of questions, culminating in Bézout’s Theorem, which counts the intersection points of two algebraic curves.  We’ll see how this theorem has manifested in different ways throughout the centuries, including most recently in the world of tropical geometry.

Ralph Morrison is an Associate Professor of Mathematics in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Williams.  After graduating from Williams College in 2010, he received his PhD in Mathematics from UC Berkeley in 2015 and completed a postdoc in KTH in Stockholm before returning to the Purple Valley.  He researches tropical and algebraic geometry, focusing on tropical curves and chip-firing games on graphs.

This talk is presented as part of the Spring 2025 Faculty Lecture Series. The series was founded in 1911 by Catherine Mariotti Pratt, the spouse of a faculty member who wanted to “relieve the tedium of long New England winters with an opportunity to hear Williams professors talk about issues that really mattered to them.” From these humble and lighthearted beginnings, the Faculty Lecture Series has grown to become an important forum for tenured professors to share their latest research with the larger intellectual community of the college.

The Faculty Lecture Series is organized by the faculty members of the Lecture Committee. The aim of the series is to present big ideas beyond disciplinary boundaries.  All lectures begin at 4:15 p.m.  They are free and open to the public.

Upcoming Faculty Lectures

March 13 — Justin Shaddock: “Kant and the Problem of Happiness”
March 20 — Joel Lee: “On the Art of Caste Concealment”