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 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.
Audience members will learn more when he speaks this week as part of the William B. Crawley Great Lives Lecture Series. Atalay’s presentation – the Coldwell Banker Elite Lecture, focusing on his latest book, Beyond Genius – 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.
“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. Read more.