{"id":266354,"date":"2025-03-12T10:00:25","date_gmt":"2025-03-12T14:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/webarchive.umw.edu\/eagleeye\/?p=266354"},"modified":"2025-03-13T14:34:00","modified_gmt":"2025-03-13T18:34:00","slug":"umw-great-lives-series-remains-brilliant-with-lecture-on-transformative-genius","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webarchive.umw.edu\/eagleeye\/2025\/03\/12\/umw-great-lives-series-remains-brilliant-with-lecture-on-transformative-genius\/","title":{"rendered":"UMW Great Lives Series Remains Brilliant With Lecture on Transformative Genius"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"University<\/a>

University of Mary Washington Professor Emeritus of Physics Bulent Atalay will deliver a presentation Thursday, March 13, in Dodd Auditorium.<\/p><\/div>

Bulent Atalay spent more than four decades teaching physics at the University of Mary Washington. On the side, he fed a passion for the arts that had possessed him from an early age.<\/p>

“As a child growing up in Turkey and England, I drew and painted everything I could get ahold of,” said Atalay, whose books of lithographs created in the 1970s can be found in the White House, Buckingham Palace and the Smithsonian. But he also discovered a penchant for numbers, equations and things mathematical, in his high school days and during his training in physics in college and graduate school.<\/p>

Audience members will learn more when he speaks this week as part of the William B. Crawley Great Lives Lecture Series<\/a>. Atalay’s presentation – the Coldwell Banker Elite Lecture, focusing on his latest book, Beyond Genius – <\/em>is scheduled for George Washington Hall’s Dodd Auditorium on Thursday, March 13, at 7:30 p.m. It’s the latest installment of the series’ 22nd season, which continues for free most Tuesdays and Thursdays through April 3.<\/p>

“Genius, like all human qualities, comes in degrees,” Atalay said during a Zoom interview from his home office, adorned with blown-up covers of his first book, 2004’s Math and the Mona Lisa<\/em>. That book examines the numbers, patterns and symmetries Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci used to create his own paintings. Published in 14 languages, the work preceded Atalay’s Leonardo’s Universe<\/em>, an illustration-filled, coffee table book published in 2009 by National Geographic, and co-authored with friend and former UMW graduate student Keith Wamsley ’03. Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bulent Atalay spent more than four decades teaching physics at the University of Mary Washington. On the side, he fed a passion for the arts that had possessed him from an early age.“As a child growing up in Turkey and England, I drew and painted everything I could get ahold of,” said Atalay, whose books […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28477,"featured_media":266355,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[116],"tags":[26035,17128,25247],"class_list":["post-266354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-whats-new-umw","tag-batalay","tag-great-lives","tag-william-b-crawley-great-lives-lecture-series","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webarchive.umw.edu\/eagleeye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webarchive.umw.edu\/eagleeye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webarchive.umw.edu\/eagleeye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webarchive.umw.edu\/eagleeye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28477"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webarchive.umw.edu\/eagleeye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webarchive.umw.edu\/eagleeye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266354\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webarchive.umw.edu\/eagleeye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webarchive.umw.edu\/eagleeye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webarchive.umw.edu\/eagleeye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webarchive.umw.edu\/eagleeye\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}