The titles and abstracts of the talks are on this page. Any student who has taken calculus knows, although perhaps is not impressed by, two important facts about mathematics. First of all, many of the important ideas in mathematics are very old. For example, calculus was developed by Newton, Leibnitz and Descartes a long, long time ago. Secondly, while it is important that mathematics is a necessary tool with applications in many disciplines, conversely, the ideas of mathematics itself have many sources.
Sciences create mathematics by translating physical ideas into mathematical questions and equations.
What is not so evident is that many of the old ideas are still connected with core research mathematics. Moreover, the process of developing new mathematics from other sciences is still taking place today. We illustrate this process with three centuries of examples of geometric equations. Try to imagine how the nineteenth century mathematicians thought about them. There are many important sources of geometry in the twentieth century, such as Einstein's theory of relativity, minimization problems and high energy physics.