This annual lecture series honors the memory of Professor Waldemar J. Trjitzinsky who came to the United States from Russia, and taught and researched in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Illinois from 1934 to 1969. The lecture series began in 1978 and was made possible from the gifts of Trjitzinsky's former Ph.D. students; Bing K. Wong, one of Trjitzinsky's students was the person responsible for setting up the Trjitzinsky fund. Each series of three lectures is aimed at a general mathematical public and graduate students.
| Year | Lecturer | Lecture Title |
| 1978 | Richard Hamming Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California |
On the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics Introduction to digital filters |
| 1979 | Paul R. Halmos Indiana University |
A decade of progress in operator theory Integral operators as "continuous" matrices Linear algebra made difficult |
| 1980 | Charles F. Miller, III University of Melbourne |
Decision problems in algebra Embedding theorems for groups Homology of finitely presented groups |
| 1981 | B. Alan Taylor University of Michigan |
The Pompieu problem and ideals of analytic functions Applications of capacities in several complex variables The complex Monge-Ampere operator and capacities in several complex variables |
| 1982 | Hugh L. Montgomery University of Michigan |
Uniform distribution and harmonic analysis An introduction to Turan's method The statistical behavior of partitions |
| 1983 | Gene Golub Stanford University |
The singular value decomposition: applications and computation Iterative methods for solving sparse systems of equations arising from elliptic PDE's Inverse Eigenvalue problems |
| 1984 | Richard A. Askey University of Wisconsin, Madison |
Gamma and beta functions and integrals in one and several variables Orthogonal polynomials old and new A new look at an old inequality |
| 1985 | Idun Reiten University of Trondheim, Norway |
Manifestations of Dynkin diagrams |
| 1986 | Donald G. Higman University of Michigan |
Finite Combinatorial Structures |
| 1987 | Eric Bedford Indiana University |
Mapping of strongly pseudoconvex domains Introduction to Monge-Ampere Capacities in Cn |
| 1988 | Marvin Knopp Temple University, Philadelphia, PA |
Recent advances in the theory of modular forms and modular integrals |
| 1989 | Ed Perkins University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada |
Brownian Motion on the Sierpinski Gasket Measure Valued Markov Processes |
| 1990 | Karen K. Uhlenbeck University of Texas, Austin |
Using non-linear analysis to understand topology |
| 1991 | Charles F. Osgood Director of the Mathematical Sciences Program and the Sabbatical Program, National Security Agency |
Approximation of algebraic functions Approximation in Nevanlinna Theory Dummy parameters in approximation theory |
| 1992 | Ronald Evans University of California at San Diego |
Integral formulas of Mehta and Dyson and Selberg Identities of classical analysis over finite fields I, II |
| 1993 | Eugenio Calabi University of Pennsylvania |
Some differential geometric methods in calculus of variations |
| 1994 | Jeffrey Vaaler University of Texas |
The number of irreducible factors of a polynomial The Beurling-Selberg extremal functions for a ball in Euclidean space Diophantine approximation in projective space and effective measures of irrationality |
| 1997 | John Lewis University of Kentucky |
Symmetry Problems and Related Topics |
| 1998 | Tsit-Yuen Lam University of California at Berkeley |
Quadratic Forms: Ideas and Examples Ring Theory: Ideas and Examples Two Great Algebraists: Artin and Brauer |
| 2000 | Elliott Lieb Princeton University |
The Quantum Mechanical World View: A Highly Sucessful but still Incomplete Theory The Mathematics and Physics of the Second Law of Thermodynamics The Bose Gas: A Subtle Many-Body Problem |
| 2001 | Martin Davis Professor Emeritus, NYU Visiting Scholar, University of California at Berkeley |
Unsolvability and Undecidability in the Diophantine Realm Gödel's Legacy Beyond the Zermelo-Fraenkel Axioms |
| 2003 | Herbert Wilf University of Pennsylvania |
Recounting the Rationals The WZ Method Permutation Patterns |
| 2005 | Jean Bourgain Institute for Advanced Study |
A Combinatorial Approach to Exponential Sum Estimates and Applications |
| 2007 | Michael Lacey Georgia Institute of Technology |
Irregularities of Distribution and Related Questions Hankel Matrices, Commutators and Product BMO |
| 2011 | Karen Vogtmann Cornell |
The topology and geometry of the automorphism group of a free group |
| 2012 | Robert Ghrist University of Pennsylvania |
Sheaves and the Global Topology of Data |
| 2012 | Akshay Venkatesh Stanford University |
I. The Cohen-Lenstra heuristics II. The topology of arithmetic manifolds III. Langlands program for torsion classes |
| 2013 | Rodrigo Banuelos Purdue University |
Martingale inequalities and applications |
| 2014 | Andrei Okounkov Columbia University |
Symplectic resolutions and Lie algebras |
| 2015 | Sergey Fomin University of Michigan |
Computing without subtracting (and/or dividing) Quiver mutations and beyond Webs, invariants, and clusters |
| 2016 | Vaughan Jones Vanderbilt University |
1. What is it about the plane? 2. Subfactors and the plane 3. Subfactors, conformal field theory and the Thompson group |
| 2017 | Alexander Kechris Caltech |
A descriptive set theoretic approach to problems in harmonic analysis, ergodic theory and combinatorics |
| 2018 | Carl Pomerance Dartmouth College |
1. What we still don't know about addition and multiplication 2. Random number theory 3. Primality testing: then and now |