Special Joint Colloquium in honour of Gavin Brown: Moran -- Half a mathematical lifetime with Gavin

There will be a special Joint Colloquium in honour of Gavin Brown on the afternoon of
Friday 18 February, following the memorial ceremony that morning.  Bill Moran has kindly
agreed to speak.  

We will leave for lunch at the Grandstand from the 2nd floor of Carslaw at 1pm.  Please
email Anne Thomas by Wednesday 16 February if you plan to attend the lunch.  

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 THE UNIVERSITIES OF SYDNEY AND NEW SOUTH WALES 

 SCHOOLS OF MATHEMATICS AND STATISTICS 

___________________JOINT COLLOQUIUM______________________ 

Speaker: Prof.  Bill Moran (Melbourne) 

Date: Friday, 18 February 2011 

Time: 14:30 

Venue: Carslaw 175, University of Sydney 

Title: Half a mathematical lifetime with Gavin 

Abstract: 

University teachers tend to treat their students as their "academic children".  Gavin
was my academic older brother.  

This is a unique and very sad occasion for me and I feel privileged to be asked to give
this talk at this time.  I intend to summarise, insofar as is possible in a single
lecture, the mathematical work of Gavin Brown, whose untimely death at Christmas left us
all feeling a profound sense of loss and, in my case, of missed opportunities.  Over the
month or so since his death, many memories of the wonderful and intense times we spent
together have returned.  For about twenty years of his and my careers, we worked closely
together, publishing around 40 papers on various topics in harmonic analysis.  In many
ways, this period was core to the later research of both of us.  Inevitably then this
talk will, to a significant extent, be a presentation of that joint work.  Later in the
talk I will discuss Gavin’s work, alone and with others, after our collaboration had run
its course.  

The key topics I will discuss are Measure Algebras, Bernoulli Measures, Riesz products,
Normality and the Schmidt conjecture, G-measures, Sum-Set Inequalities, and
Trigonometric Inequalities, since these define most of Gavin’s areas of interest over
his mathematical career, though I will touch on some other topics where I think that
Gavin made a rather unique contribution.  

It would be inappropriate on this special occasion to spend much time discussing the
technical details of his work.  Rather I will use the mathematics as a backdrop for
reminiscing about the man and what it was like to work with him.