Calendar of Events

Rhonda Cobham-Sander, the Emily C. Jordan Folger Professor of Black Studies and English, will reflect with us about her teaching now and how her teaching has evolved throughout her career at Amherst College.

RSVP through the Center for Teaching and Learning website.

Keramet Reiter, Associate Professor of Criminology, Law & Society in the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine, will present a paper entitled “Law’s Infamy: Ashker v. Brown and the Failures of Solitary Confinement Reform.” This is the fifth presentation in a series of seminars that will take place this year on the theme “Law’s Infamy.”
Keramet Reiter studies prisons, prisoners’ rights, and the impact of prison and punishment policy on individuals, communities, and legal systems.

"After giving an overview of the Japanese court system, I would like to talk about the mediation system, which has been evaluated as characteristic in the Japanese court system. Of course, there is a mediation system in the United States, but mediation in Japan is performed in a court building and involves nonlegal professionals as mediators, which is completely different from mediation in the United States. I would like to think about how disputes are resolved in Japanese court through this characteristic system and what kind of image the Japanese have of the court."

—Yukihiro Okada, Professor of Law at Doshisha University

Presented by the Doshisha University and Amherst College Faculty Exchange Program

Please note that this lecture will be in Japanese.

Some definitions of the word symmetry include “correct or pleasing proportion of the parts of a thing,” “balanced proportions” and “the property of remaining invariant under certain changes, as of orientation in space.” One might think of snowflakes, butterflies and our own faces as naturally symmetric objects—or at least close to it. Mathematically, one can also conjure up many symmetric objects: even and odd functions, fractals, certain matrices and modular forms, a type of symmetric complex function. All of these things exhibit a kind of beauty in their symmetries, so would they lose some of their innate beauty if their symmetries were altered? Alternatively, could some measure of beauty be gained with slight symmetric imperfections? We will explore these questions, guided by the topic of modular forms and their variants. What can be gained by perturbing modular symmetries in particular? We will discuss this theme from past to present: the origins of these questions have their roots in the first half of the 20th century, dating back to Ramanujan and Gauss, while some fascinating and surprising answers come from just the last 15 years.