Alice Roth Lecture 2025

We are very pleased to announce the next Alice Roth Lecture, which will be delivered by Caroline Series, FRS.

 Prof. Caroline Series, FRS
"The suggestive power of pictures”

Thursday, May 15, 2025
5.15–6.45 p.m.
Audimax,  HG F 30 (ETH Zürich, Main Building)

This annual series of lectures, held by women of outstanding stature in mathematics, was established in honour of Alice Roth (1905-1977), the first woman to obtain a doctorate with a thesis in mathematics at ETH in 1938. Alice Roth’s thesis was awarded an ETH Silver Medal, and it was the first thesis by a woman in the whole of ETH to obtain this distinction. Alice Roth then worked as teacher in a private school in Bern, and only returned to do research in mathematics when she retired.

By the age of 70 she was lecturing for the first time about her work outside Switzerland. Her area of research was approximation theory and complex analysis; her thesis contained an example that was rediscovered by Sergey Mergelyan in 1951, and named after him until her prior work was itself rediscovered.