The speaker for the 2018 Howard Rowlee Lecture is Dave Benson, professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is 4 p.m. April 27 in Avery Hall’s Room 115.

Benson’s talk, “Symmetry in Mathematics,” will discuss symmetry and cohomology of groups in nature, music, first-grade arithmetic, and crystallography.

His research area is group theory, broadly interpreted, including the cohomology theory and representation theory of such, and the connections of these topics with algebraic topology, algebraic geometry and commutative algebra.

Benson received his doctorate from Cambridge University under the direction of John Thompson and was a professor at the University of Georgia before moving to Scotland.