History: The Lectures

Since 1984 the Mathematics Department at Tulane University has held the annual Clifford Lectures, a week-long series of talks by a distinguished mathematician. A mini-conference is held in conjunction with each of the Clifford Lecture series. A unique feature of the conference is that the other invited speakers are selected by the Clifford Lecturer.
The first Clifford Lecturer was Fields Medal recipient Charles Fefferman of Princeton University. Since then, other Clifford lecturers have been: Fields Medal winners S. T. Yau of UCSD (1985) and William Thurston of Princeton (1986). From 1987 through 1990 Clifford lecturers were Saharon Shelah of Hebrew University Clifford Taubes of Harvard, Charles Peskin of the Courant Institute and Haim Brezis of Université de Paris and Rutgers; from 1991 to 1996 they included Sylvain Cappell of the Courant Institute, Nigel Hitchin of the University of Warwick, Persi Diaconis of Harvard, Peter Sarnak of Princeton and Dan Voiculescu of Berkeley. More recently the Clifford lecturers have been Paul Fife of University of Utah (Spring 1997), Peter Kronheimer of Harvard (Fall 1997), Peter J. Bickel of Berkeley (1998), A. J. Chorin of Berkeley (Spring 1999), Clifford Taubes of Harvard (2000), and Sergei N. Artemov of City University of New York (Spring 2002).