Renowned chemical engineer and professor Robert Byron Bird will deliver a pair of lectures hosted by the Departments of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry and Biochemistry at Brigham Young University Wednesday and Thursday, Nov. 17 and 18.
Bird’s first presentation is the annual Reed M. Izatt and James J. Christensen Lecture, titled “What Makes Scientists and Discoverers Tick,” and will be given Wednesday at 7 p.m. in 1060 Harold B. Lee Library.
This lecture will focus on the world’s great scientists, discoverers and inventors. Using the stories of people like the Wright brothers, Lewis and Clark and mathematician Emmy Noether, Bird will tell how some of history’s brightest and bravest characters got their start, overcame challenges that stood in their way and impacted those who followed them.
His second lecture, a technical seminar called “An Introduction to the Kinetic Theory of Polymers (or How Can Dumbbells Be So Smart?),” will be Thursday at 4 p.m. in W112 Ezra Taft Benson Building. This seminar will discuss the kinetic theory of polymeric fluids. Beginning with a summary of polymeric fluid flow behavior, he will explain how the material functions of these fluids are measured and modeled and how the stress tensor is expressed.
Bird’s research has earned him a National Medal of Science from President Ronald Reagan and a Bingham Medal from the Society of Rheology. He received his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana‒Champaign and his doctorate in physical chemistry from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he is an emeritus professor in the Chemical Engineering Department.
For more information, contact Michael Dorff at (801) 422-1752 or mdorff@math.byu.edu.
Writer: Philip Volmar
