Every year, the Distinguished Lecture Series (DLS) brings two to four eminent mathematicians to UCLA for a week or more to give a lecture series on their field, and to meet with faculty and graduate students.

The first lecture of each series is aimed at a general mathematical audience, and offers a rare opportunity to see the state of an area of mathematics from the perspective of one of its leaders.  The remaining lectures in the series are usually more advanced, concerning recent developments in the area.

Previous speakers of the DLS include: Peter Sarnak, Peter Schneider, Zhenghan Wang, Pierre Colmez, Etienne Ghys, Goro Shimura, Jean Bellissard, Andrei Suslin, Pierre Deligne, Michael Harris, Alexander Lubotzky, Shing-Tau Yau, Hillel Furstenberg, Robert R. Langlands, Clifford Taubes, Louis Nirenberg, Oded Schramm, Louis Nirenberg, I.M. Singer, Jesper Lutzen, L.H. Eliasson, Raoul Bott, Dennis Gaitsgory, Gilles Pisier, Gregg Zuckerman, Freydoon Shahidi, Alain Connes, Jöran Friberg, David Mumford, Sir Michael Atiyah, Jean-Michel Bismut, Jean-Pierre Serre, G. Tian, N. Sibony, C. Deninger, Peter Lax, and Nikolai Reshetikhin, Horng-Tzer Yau, Ken Ono, Leonid Polterovich, Barry Mazur, Grigori Margulis, Mario Bonk, Avi Wigderson, John Coates, Charles Fefferman, C. David Levermore, Shouwu Zhang.

The DLS is currently supported by the Larry M. Wiener fund.