NOTICE: Gould has cancelled tonight's lecture due to illness. More information will be posted when available. For immediate assistance, please call the UMBC Humanities Forum, 410.455.6798.

BALTIMORE--UMBC's Humanities Forum lecture series presents best-selling author Stephen Jay Gould who will discuss one of today's most pressing subjects: the significance of the millennium. The lecture which centers around Gould's new book, Questioning the Millennium, will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, October 14 in UMBC's University Center Ballroom.

A popular interpreter of science and its complex social consequences, Gould is one of the few distinguished intellectuals whose lectures draw pop-star size audiences. Gould is especially interested in mathematical problems of growth and form applied to the evolution of lineages. For his Humanities Forum lecture, Gould will ask and answer three major questions that define the approaching calendrical event. First, what exactly is the concept of a millennium and how has its meaning shifted? Second, how did the name for a future thousand-year reign of Christ on earth get transferred to the passage of time of a secular period of a thousand years in current human history. And when does the millennium begin: January 1, 2000 or January 1, 2001?

Serving as president-elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Gould is also the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and a professor of geology at Harvard and is curator for invertebrate paleontology at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. He also serves as the Vincent Astor Visiting Professor of Biology at New York University. His most recent books are Full House and Dinosaur in a Haystack. He lives in Cambridge, Mass. and New York City.

For more information about the Humanities Forum call UMBC's Center for the Humanities at 410.455.6798.