Bernard Lecture

The Bernard Society Lectureship features a prominent authority in mathematics or computer science who engages members of the college community, including students, faculty, alumni, and the general public, in discussions and lectures.

2026 Lecture

The department is thrilled to welcome Dr. Cynthia Dwork, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science, John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University and Affiliated Faculty at Harvard Law School.

Dr. Dwork will deliver a public lecture on Thursday, April 23, at 7:30 p.m. in the Duke Family Performance Hall, Knoblach Campus Center.

Title: Differential Privacy: Public Methods for Private Data

Abstract: Differential privacy is a mathematically rigorous definition of privacy tailored to the statistical analysis of large datasets.  Simple aggregate statistics of confidential data always leak some information.  Each of those statistics is like a small x-ray:  An individual exposure causes little damage, but, just as risk from x-rays accumulates to cause serious physical harm, information leakage due to multiple statistics can in combination completely destroy privacy.  Differential privacy provides a quantitative measure of privacy loss and mathematics for how it accumulates.  Equipped with this measure, researchers and practitioners design methods to control privacy loss, just as algorithms experts and programmers design methods to minimize the running time of their programs. 

Differential Privacy is now widely deployed in industry.  In the public sphere, Differential Privacy most notably served as the foundation for the confidentiality protections legally required in the 2020 US Decennial Census. For the first time, this allowed complete transparency regarding the Census Bureau’s privacy-preserving methods, enabling the publication of a detailed description of the algorithm and the GitHub codebase.

This talk will explain the Differential Privacy guarantee, give some intuition about how to achieve it, and discuss its uses in industry and government.

Previous Lectures

• 2019 - Professor William (Bill) J. Cook, University of Waterloo and Johns Hopkins University, "The Traveling Salesman Problem: Postcards From The Edge of Impossibility"
• 2018 - Professor Ken Ono, Emory University, “Who was ‘The Man Who Knew Infinity,’ and why does he matter?”
• 2017 - Professor Gregory S. Warrington, University of Vermont, "Mathematical Analyses of Gerrymandering"
• 2016 - Professor Ronald Gould, Emory University, "Some Unusual Applications of Mathematics"
• 2015 - Professor Susan Loepp, Williams College, "Protecting Your Personal Information: An Introduction to Encryption"
• 2014 - Professor Jesús De Loera, University of California, "The combinatorial structure of convex polytopes"
• 2013 - Professor Emeritus Larry Baggett, University of Colorado Boulder, "In the Dark on the Sunny Side: A Memoir of an Out-of-Sight Mathematician"
• 2012 - Professor Paul Edelman, Vanderbilt University, "Mathematics and the Law: The Apportionment of the House of Representatives")
• 2011 - Professor Sue Whitesides, University of Victoria, "At the crossroads of geometry, discrete mathematics, and algorithm design"
• 2010 - Professor Manjul Bhargava, Princeton University, "Linguistics, Poetry, and Mathematics"
• 2009 - Professor Joseph Gallian, University of Minnesota Duluth, "Using Mathematics to Create Symmetry Patterns"
• 2008 - Professor Keith Devlin, Stanford University, "When Mathematics Changed the World"
• 2007 - Professor Francis Edward Su, Harvey Mudd College, "Preference Sets, Graphs, and Voting in Agreeable Societies"
• 2006 - Professor Jeffrey Lagarias, University of Michigan, "Mathematical Crystals and Quasicrystals"
• 2005 - Professor Ronald Graham, University of California, San Diego, "Searching for the Shortest Network"
• 2004 - Professor Georgia Benkart, University of Wisconsin, "Ladies of the Ring: A Tale of Two Women and Their Mathematics"
• 2003 - Professor Edward Scheinerman, Johns Hopkins University, "Mathematics Through Games"
• 2002 - Professor Underwood Dudley, DePauw University, "Why Teach Mathematics?"
• 2001 - Professor Emeritus Carl Pomerance, University of Georgia & Bell Laboratories, "Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, Paul Erdos, and Me"
• 2000 - Professor Lenore Blum, Carnegie Mellon University, "Complexity and Real Computation--Where Turing Meets Newton"
• 1999 - Professor William R. Pulleyblank, Director of Mathematical Sciences in IBM's Research Division and Director of the IBM Deep Computing Institute, "Duality and Mathematical Optimization"
• 1998 - Professor Maynard Thompson, Indiana University, "Stratified Population Models and Applications in Ecology"
• 1997 - Professor David Bressoud, Macalester College, "Alternating Sign Matrix Conjecture"
• 1996 - Professor Robert Bryant, Duke University, "The Notions of Area and Volume and Geometry: From the Greeks to the Moderns"
• 1995 - Professor William Dunham, Muhlenberg College, "A Tribute to Euler"; author of Journey Through Genius, The Mathematical Universe, and Euler: Master of Us All
• 1994 - Professor Robert Devaney, Boston University, "The Fractal Geometry of the Mandelbrot Set"
• 1993 - Professor Brian White, Stanford University, "On Beyond Infinity"
• 1992 - Professor Victor Klee, The University of Washington, Seattle, "Some Unsolved Problems in Intuitive Geometry"