Department of Mathematics
Colloquium
by
Prof. Bruce Reznick

This talk is intended to be accessible to all members of the department, especially including first year graduate students.

Suggested reading:

Most of the mathematical content of this talk is contained in a survey paper by the same name, which can be downloaded from the departmental web page at

http://www.math.uiuc.edu/Reports/reznick/97-001.html.

An accessible introduction to some of the material is "Hilbert's 17th problem and the champagne problem", by Victoria Powers, in the December 1996 Monthly, 879--887. Departmental greybeards may wish to exhume their notes from my job interview lecture of January 30, 1979 and see if I've learned anything in 19 years.