Professor Rainich is a noted scholar, and is recognized as the foremost authority in this country on the Theory of Relativity and allied subjects. Professor Rainich is a Russian by birth and an interesting story is told of an experience he had while lecturing at Columbia University. Speaking on Relativity before the faculty he quoted a number of the foremost authorities known upon the subject. One of the members of the Columbia faculty spoke up saying, "That is all very well but why don't you quote what Rabinovich has said upon this subject? "Professor Rainich was somewhat embarrassed as he replied, "Well, you see, I am Rabinovich."
The Rainich Lectures were established in 1981 by an endowment from Professor Raymond L. Wilder and his wife, Una, honoring Professor George “Yuri” Rainich, who served on our faculty for 30 years until retiring in 1956.
Read more about George Yuri Rainich here
Distinguished mathematicians who have given these lectures are listed below.
| Date | Speaker/Organization | Lecture Title |
April 11-13, 2023
| Rahul Pandharipande, ETH Zürich | Moduli Space of Curves Moduli Space of Abelian Varieties Moduli Space of K3 Surfaces |
| October 26-28, 2021 | Akshay Venkatesh, Institutue for Advanced Study | 3987^{12} + 4365^{12} = 4472^{12} (almost) Symplectic L-Functions and Their Topological Analogues Relative Langlands Duality |
| March 20-22, 2018 | Richard Taylor, Institute of Advanced Study |
Galois theory and locally symmetric spaces Modularity lifting theorems in the setting of locally symmetric spaces |
| March 16 & 18, 2010 | Terence Tao, University of California, Los Angeles | The Proof of the Poincaré Conjecture Discrete Random Matrices |
| January 15-17, 2008 | Gang Tian, Princeton University | |
| October 31 - November 2, 2006 | Philip Holmes, Princeton University | |
| 2003 | Nancy Kopell, Boston University | |
| 2002 | Robert McPherson, Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton | |
| 2001 | Martin Nowak, Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton | |
| 1998 | Graeme Segal, St. John's College | |
| 1996 | Jean-Pierre Serre, Collège de France | |
| 1994 | Kenneth Ribet, University of California, Berkeley | |
| 1990 | Persi Diaconis, Harvard University | |
| 1988 | Richard M. Schoen, Stanford University | |
| 1986 | Avner Freedman, Purdue University | |
| 1982 | Lipman Bers, Columbia University |
