Kevin Beanland to Deliver Lecture in Honor of His Appointment to the Rupert and Lillian Radford Professorship Beanland’s talk, titled “Searching for Structure in Infinite Dimensions,” will be held Sept. 29 in Science Addition, Room 214.

By Brian Laubscher
September 11, 2026

Kevin Beanland, professor of mathematics and associate dean of the College for administration at Washington and Lee University, will present a public lecture to mark his appointment to the Rupert and Lillian Radford Professorship.

Beanland’s lecture, “Searching for Structure in Infinite Dimensions,” will be held at 5 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 29, in Science Addition, Room 214. The talk is free and open to the public and will be immediately followed by a reception held in the Science Addition Great Hall.

Beanland will discuss the process of mathematical discovery and the role of pure mathematics in advancing knowledge. Drawing on examples from his own research, he will explore how mathematicians formulate questions, develop new theories and seek to understand the underlying structure of the mathematical world.

“My hope is that people without any background in mathematical research will come away with a sense of the questions that drive theoretical mathematics and how the pursuit of those questions has created rich and beautiful theories, connecting generations of mathematicians,” said Beanland. “It’s also a nice way to inform our community of what I’ve been up to for the last 20 years!”

Beanland has been a member of the W&L faculty since 2013 and joined the Dean’s Office as associate dean in 2022. He previously taught at Amherst College and Virginia Commonwealth University. His research focuses on the field of Banach space theory, looking at the geometry of Banach spaces and the examination of bounded linear operator within the spaces.

Beanland has also published in many leading journals alongside colleagues and students alike. At the university, he has served on the President’s Advisory Committee, the Faculty Executive Committee and the University Committee on Inclusiveness and Campus Climate. He has also been a visiting scholar at the National Technical University of Athens (Greece), Jagiellonian University (Poland) and Vienna University of Technology (Austria). Beanland holds a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics from St. Mary’s College of Maryland and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of South Carolina.

The Rupert and Lillian Radford Professorship in Mathematics was created in 1982 as the result of a gift from the Rupert Radford Trust, created by the late Rupert Radford of Houston.