Date: Friday, March 21, 2003 Time: 4:00 p.m. Room: NPB 1001 Opening Remarks by Win Phillips Vice-President of Research Refreshments: 3:30 p.m. in the NPB Foyer

Abstract: In this talk, I shall describe my initiation by Rodney Baxter into the world of exactly solved models. Much of the talk will examine how the first discoveries were made that led to today's flourishing interaction between q-series and statistical mechanics. I begin with the events of 1979 surrounding the original hard hexagon model, then move to 1983 for the eight-vertex SOS model and finally to the 1986 lattice gas generalization of the hard hexagon model. The perspective throughout will be that of a somewhat diffident number theorist who was totally amazed that his beloved Rogers-Ramanujan identities possessed importance so far afield from number theory. The impact of physics on the direction of research in partitions and q-series will be emphasized.

Evan Pugh Professor George E. Andrews of the Pennsylvania State University is the world's leading authority in the theory of partitions and on the work of Srinivasa Ramanujan. In December 2002, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate at the University of Florida in recognition of his fundamental research. This featured lecture is being arranged in connection with the International Conference Number Theory and Combinatorics in Physics. For more information see the conference website:
http://www.math.ufl.edu/~frank/qmiftconf.html.