The Heyser Series is an endowment for lectures by eminent individuals with outstanding reputations in audio engineering and its related fields. The series is featured twice annually at both the United States and European AES conventions. Established in May 1999, the Richard C. Heyser Memorial Lecture honors the memory of Richard Heyser, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who was awarded nine patents in audio and communication techniques and was widely known for his ability to clearly present new and complex technical ideas. Mr. Heyser was also an AES governor and AES Silver Medal recipient.

The Richard C. Heyser distinguished lecturer for this convention is Dr. Manfred Schroeder, who discussed "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in Audio".

Mathematics has had an almost uncanny impact on audio. From the abundance of applications of various branches of mathematics of audio engineering and music, Dr. Schroeder will focus on the following topics: the maximum-length sequences for the precision measurement of impulse and frequency responses of recording studios, concert halls, and all manner of audio components; the realization of efficient sound scattering by means of quadratic-residue diffusers and other number-theoretic phase gratings; the error-correcting codes for compact discs; the measurement of reverberation times and sound decay rates by reverse integration; and the statistics of reverberant sound fields in acoustics spaces. He will also briefly discuss the potential of the famous Fibonacci numbers, the related "rabbit" sequence, and other self-similar number sequences for composing pleasing music and generating exciting rhythms.

Manfred Schroeder studied mathematics and physics at the University of Göttingen in Germany, where he investigated the distribution of resonance in concert halls using microwave cavities as models. The chaotic distribution he found is now recognized as characteristic of complex (nonintegrable) dynamical systems. In 1954, Dr. Schroeder joined the Research Department of AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. From 1958 to 1969 he directed research at Bell on speech compression, synthesis, and recognition. Since 1969 he has served as professor of physics at the University of Göttingen, commuting between the University and Bell. Since 1991 he has been professor emeritus at the University. Dr. Schroeder is also a founding member of the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In the late 1950s he helped to formulate the U.S. standards for stereophonic broadcasting, which is now used worldwide. Dr. Schroeder holds 45 U.S. patents in speech and signal processing and other fields. He is also the author of several books including: Number Theory in Science and Communication; Fractals Chaos, Power Laws: Minutes from an Infinite Paradise; and Computer Speech: Recognition, Compression, Synthesis. Dr. Schroeder has also been awarded Gold Medals from the AES (1972) and the Acoustical Society of America (1991), the Lord Raleigh Medal of the British Institute of Acoustics, and the Helmholtz Medal of the German Acoustical Society. He is a life fellow of the AES and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the New York Academy of Sciences. He is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering in Washington and the Göttingen Academy of Sciences.

The Technical Council and its Committees invited you to an exciting evening of inspiring talk, refreshments, and splendid company.