Sep 26, 2007 - Claremont, Calif. - Arnold Barnett of MIT will deliver the opening talk of the ninth annual HMC Mathematics Conference on Friday, Sept. 28, at 7 p.m., in Galileo-McAlister Hall.  

His talk, titled "Is It Really Safe to Fly?," will open the event, which this year focuses on public sector operations research. Barnett will discuss several data analyses about the mortality risk of passenger air travel. These analyses offer estimates of actual risk levels, as well as comparative findings about different periods, regions and airlines. A question of practical importance that he will confront is: Given that two airlines fly a route nonstop, is there ever any reason related to safety to prefer one over the other? He will also consider some questions about air safety that cannot be answered with the data available now. However, operations research reasoning provides some insight about what the answers might be.

Arnold Barnett's research specialty is applied mathematical modeling with a focus on problems of health and safety. His early work on homicide was presented to President Gerald Ford at the White House, and his analysis of U.S. casualties in Vietnam was the subject of a column by William F. Buckley. He has received the President's Award and the Expository Writing Award from INFORMS in 1996 and in 2001, and is a fellow of INFORMS.  Barnett has been called the "nation's leading expert" on aviation safety, and in 2002 received the President's Citation from the Flight Safety Foundation for "truly outstanding contributions on behalf of safety." He has written op-ed pieces for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe and USA Today. He has been honored by students at the MIT Sloan School of Management for outstanding teaching on 10 occasions.

The conference is sponsored by the HMC Department of Mathematics with support from the Office of the Dean of Faculty. For more information, see http://math.hmc.edu/baldyconf.