Dr. Adriana Salerno will deliver the 82nd Harry S. Kieval Lecture at Cal Poly Humboldt on Thursday, October 9, 2025. The lecture will take place at 7:00 p.m. in Room 135 of the Science-B Building on the Cal Poly Humboldt campus. The public is welcome to this free lecture, which is geared toward a general audience.

The title of Dr. Salerno's lecture is “The Stories We Tell.” In this talk, Dr. Salerno will discuss how, whether they are aware of it or not, mathematics teachers tell stories in their classrooms about what mathematics is and who it's for. Additionally, each individual in the classroom brings in their own stories and experiences with mathematics. She will share how acknowledging and making room for different stories has shaped her classroom, informed her work as a federal employee, and helped her make “good trouble.” And of course, the lecture itself will include stories.

Dr. Adriana Salerno is a past Vice-President of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) and previously held the position of professor of mathematics at Bates College in Maine. At Bates College, Dr. Salerno served as department chair and chair of the university's Diversity Action Team. She received the MAA's prestigious Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics in 2023. Dr. Salerno was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela where she studied mathematics at the Universidad Simón Bolívar. She received her Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin in the area of number theory. Her scholarly work explores the intersection of number theory with geometry, physics, coding theory, and cryptography. She has given courses and classes at diverse locations including a mini-course on p-adic numbers in Dangbo, Benin, a class on lattices and cryptography in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, and a class on algebraic number theory in Şirince, Turkey.
Please see https://sites.google.com/view/asalerno/home?authuser=0 for further details about Dr. Salerno's work and accomplishments.

The Kieval lecture series is named for Mathematics Professor Emeritus, Dr. Harry S. Kieval, who taught at Cal Poly Humboldt from 1966 to 1979. The series includes topics on popular and/or broad aspects of mathematics attractive to undergraduates and the public. For more information, please visit www.humboldt.edu/mathematics/kieval-lecture.