Speaker: Joel Langer, Professor, Case Western University

Abstract: This talk will romp through hundreds (ok thousands!) of years of history: From the spiric sections of Perseus, to the planetary orbits of Cassini, to mechanical linkages of Watt and others; not to mention the "Enigma of Viviani's Temple" and the early investigations on the theory of elasticity by Bernoulli himself. But above all, the lemniscate is tied to the birth of elliptic functions and their connections to the theory of equations and numbers through the discoveries of Count Fagnano, Euler, Gauss and Abel.