Please join us for a Distinguished Lecture Series with Roland Speicher which begins with a public talk entitled "Dan-Virgil Voiculescu: visionary operator algebraist and creator of free probability theory." 

Professor Speicher received the diploma degree in physics in 1986 and the Ph.D. degree in mathematics in 1989 from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He was a Professor of Mathematics at Queen's University (Kingston, Canada) from 2000 to 2010, since 2010 he is Professor at Saarland University (Saarbrücken, Germany).

His research centers around free probability theory and its combinatorial aspects, with applications to random matrices, statistical mechanics, and operator algebras.

Dr. Speicher was a Heisenberg Fellow of the German Science Foundation from 1995 to 2000 and a Killam Research Fellow of the Canada Council for the Arts in 2007 and 2008. He was a recipient of a Premier's Research Excellence Award from the Prime Minister of Ontario in 2000 and of a Leadership Support Initiative Award from NSERC in 2003. He was awarded the Excellence in Research Prize from Queen's University in 2010 and the Jeffery-Williams Prize of the Canadian Mathematical Society CMS in 2012. In 2014 he received an ERC Advanced grant from the European Union. Dr. Speicher was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians 2014 in Seoul.