LEWISTON – The vice president of the American Mathematical Society will present two lectures at Bates College on Friday, March 14.

Ruth Charney will give a talk titled “The Large Scale Geometry of Groups” at 4:30 p.m. in Room 104, Hathorn Hall, 3 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk). In the college’s annual Richard W. Sampson Lecture, she will address the topic “From Robotics to Geometry: Building Models with Cubes” at 7:30 p.m. in the Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road.

Sponsored by the mathematics department, the talks are open to the public at no cost.

Charney’s research spans several areas of mathematics, including K-theory, algebraic topology and geometric group theory.

Charney chairs the mathematics faculty at Brandeis University. She received her doctorate from Princeton University in 1977 and held a postdoctoral position at the University of California, Berkeley, followed by a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at Yale.

The Richard W. Sampson Lecture at Bates honors the memory of Sampson, a professor emeritus of mathematics, who served on the Bates faculty from 1952 until his retirement as professor of mathematics in 1990.