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Professor Frederico and Joana Xavier Endowed Mathematics Lectureship

The first annual Professor Frederico and Joana Xavier Endowed Mathematics Lectureship took place on April 14 and 15, 2023. The lectures were given by Mohammad Ghomi of the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Poster for Xavier Lecture


Video recordings of the lectures can be found here:
Video of first talk
Video of second talk


About Mohammad Ghomi: Mohammad Ghomi completed his PhD thesis in 1998 under the direction of Joel Spruck at Johns Hopkins University, where he had received the J.J. Sylvester Award. Subsequently he held positions at U.C. Santa Cruz, University of South Carolina, and Penn State, before moving to Georgia Tech in 2005. His research has been consistently supported by NSF grants including a CAREER Award, and he has been a Simons Fellow.


About Frederico Xavier: Following Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at Universidade Federal de Pernambuco in his native Brazil, Fred Xavier earned his Ph.D. at the University of Rochester in 1977 under Richard Lavine. From 1977 to 1983, he returned to Universidade Federal de Pernambuco as a professor, during which time he spent a year as a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. After a year as a Visiting Associate Professor at Purdue University, he went on to a long and distinguished career at the University of Notre Dame, with his primary research focus in differential geometry and related subjects. He retired from Notre Dame in 2015 to become the second John William and Helen Stubbs Potter Professor of Mathematics at TCU, a post he held until his retirement in 2021. He has been a visiting member at IHES in France and a visiting Extraordinary Professor at IMPA in Brazil. Since 1989, he has been a full member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. The Xavier Lectures are funded by a generous gift to TCU from Fred and his wife, Joana.