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INSTITUTE FOR MATHEMATICS &
ITS APPLICATIONS
IMA MATH MODELING WORKSHOP
If you visited the fifth floor at the end of July, you might
have noticed increased activity in rooms 502 and 570. These rooms were
occupied by two of the six graduate student teams participating in the
IMA Mathematical Modeling in
Industry Workshop, held July 19-28 (Rachel
Kuske and Fernando Reitich,
organizers). During this bi-annual 10 day workshop, six industry mentors
supervised projects teams of six students each. The purpose of the workshop
was to expose students to the types of mathematical problems which arise
in industry, thus providing an educational experience complementary to
the usual academic program. The topics were Network Analysis (NSA), Speech
Recognition (Lingustic Technologies), Computed Tomography (GE), RF Communication
Circuits (Lucent), Surface Intersection Problem of Optimal Design (Boeing),
Dynamics of Microactuators (Kodak). The student teams developed models
and algorithms for analyzing the problems which had been presented by
the industry mentors on the first day of the workshop. The groups used
mathematical techniques from a wide range of areas, including numerical
linear algebra, optimization, combinatorics, probability, statistics,
differential equations, Fourier analysis, and geometry. The students worked
intensely for the whole workshop, causing one mentor to comment, "I
can't figure out when they're eating and sleeping." They did take
some time out for a picnic on the River Flats, an impropmtu soccer game,
and a look around downtown Minneapolis. Two of the mentors, being puzzle
enthusiasts, entertained the participants with some mind-twisters. By
the end of the workshop, everyone appeared to be exhausted (even one of
the mentors pulled an "all-nighter" on the last day) but pleased
with their results. Each team gave a presentation of their results, with
several of the groups providing valuable new insight into the industry
problems. The final reports and presentations are available from the IMA
web page.
Rachel Kuske
Associate Professor of Mathematics
IMA UPDATE
The IMA annual program for the academic year 2000-2001, "Mathematics
in Multimedia", is divided into three components: "Vision,
Speech and Language" (September-December, 2000), "Digital
Libraries" (January-March, 2001), and "Geometric
Design and Computer Graphics" (April-June, 2001). Professor Peter
Olver of the School of Mathematics is one of the members of the organizing
committee. A large variety of mathematical tools and theories are relevant
to multimedia, and thus the program is exposing mathematicians to a new
range of challenging and timely problems and applications, and, hopefully,
helping to lay foundations for a genuinely mathematical discipline that
will become known as "multimedia".
The 2001 Summer Program (July 16-27, 2001) is "Geometric
Methods in Inverse Problems and PDE Control". Next year's program
will be "Mathematics
in Geosciences". A preparatory seminar is being run during the
current academic year; Professor
George Sell of the School of Mathematics is the organizer. Details
about all of the IMA programs can be found on the IMA website: www.ima.umn.edu.
David C. Dobson (a 1990-92 IMA Industrial Postdoc) received the
Felix Klein Prize at the 3rd (2000) European Congress of Mathematics in
Barcelona. The Felix Klein prize "is awarded to a young scientist
or a small group of scientists for using sophisticated methods to give
an outstanding solution, which meets with the complete satisfaction of
industry, to a concrete and difficult industrial problem." The program
award states "David C. Dobson started his work on the diffraction
of electromagnetic waves from periodic structures, when he was a postdoc
at the famous Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications of Professor
Avner Friedman. The Honeywell Technology Center had posed the problem
to model and analyze the diffraction and to develop appropriate numerical
algorithms. In a next step an optimal shape design problem for phase lenses
was solved. The fact, that he used a "Fraunhofer approximation"
was not (!) the reason to give him a prize endowed by the Fraunhofer Institute
for Mathematics, what convinced the committee, that he should be the first
prize winner, was, that he used rigorous and sound mathematical methods
in a quite tricky way for the problem, which Honeywell states to be of
very high industrial importance."
www@math.umn.edu
URL http://www.math.umn.edu/index.shtml
The University of Minnesota
is an equal opportunity educator and employer.
2000, The Regents of the University of Minnesota
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