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Newsletter 2003


SPEAKING INVITATIONS AND OTHER NOTABLE ACTIVITIES

Professor Douglas Arnold was recently elected to a three-year term on the Council of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), SIAM's main policy-making body. He is also a member of a number of scientific advisory boards. As many of our readers are aware, since September 2001, he is serving as the Director of the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications which is associated with our department.

In October 2003, Professor Arnold was a ncm2 Distinguished Lecturer (ncm2 is the Network for Computing and Mathematical Modeling, a Canadian initiative based in Montreal). The title of his lecture was "From Exact Sequences to Colliding Black Holes: Differential Complexes in Numerical Analysis". In January 2004 he spoke at the Oxford University Colloquium on "Stable and Unstable Discretization of Partial Differential Equations".

His other recent invited talks include a keynote address at the opening of the Applied Mathematics Program at University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), titled "Mathematics in a Dangerous Time", as well as a commencement address for the mathematics and statistics graduation at UIUC, titled "Doing the Math and Making an Impact". Both of these talks were given in May 2003.

The first of these talks deals with applications of mathematics to problems connected with homeland security and antiterrorism. Some of the topics addressed include cryptography, mathematical epidemiology with emphasis on special problems posed by bio-terrorism, data mining for counter-terrorism, and face and voice detection and recognition. Both history as well as current efforts are discussed. Slides can be found online at http://www.ima.umn.edu/~arnold/talks/danger.pdf

The second address covers topics that may be of wide interest, so we include some of the highlights below in the Newsletter in a note titled "Why is mathematics important".

Professor Maury Bramson gave an invited one-hour address at a Conference on Interacting Particle Systems held in Santiago, Chile in January 2004.

Professor Paul Garrett's book "Making and Breaking Codes: an Introduction to Cryptology" (Prentice-Hall, 2001), has been translated into Chinese. He wrote this book as a text for the popular course Cryptology (Math 5248) since no existing text met the needs of that course. His text "Mathematics of Coding Theory: Information, Compression, Error Correction" for the companion course Coding Theory (Math 5251) was published in 2003, also by Prentice-Hall.

During January 2004, Professor Dihua Jiang delivered invited lectures at Fudan University and East China Normal University in Shanghai, and at the Center of Mathematical Sciences, Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. He will give an invited 90 minute lecture on his work, with David Ginzburg (Tel Aviv University) and Stephen Rallis (Ohio State), on the Gross-Prasad conjecture, at the Joint Columbia-CUNY-NYU Number Theory Seminar, March 24, 2004. During the coming June, he will be an invited speaker at a conference celebrating the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Mathematics Institute at East China Normal University.

Professor Dennis Hejhal gave an invited series of lectures on "Maass Waveforms and Computational Spectral Theory" at the International Summer School on "Mathematical Aspects of Quantum Chaos", October 4-11, 2003, sponsored by the E.U. (i.e. European Union). The meeting was held at Schloss Reisensburg, a castle located near Ulm, Germany. Professor Hejhal will give a similar series of lectures this coming May at the Centre de Recherches Mathematiques in Montreal, Canada.

Professor Mark Keel was an invited speaker at the conference "Frontiers of PDE and Dynamical Systems" at Rutgers University in May 2003 and at the conference "Partial Differential Equations and Applications" at the University of Notre Dame in August 2003. Also, at the invitation of the Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisbon, Portugal, he delivered a series of lectures to the mathematics department there in December 2003.

In October 2003, Professor Tian-Jun Li was an invited speaker at the Peking University Symposium commemorating the 90-th anniversary of the opening of the Faculty of Mathematics. During the current academic year, he is teaching a new, year long graduate level course on symplectic topology. The topic of the course is classification of symplectic structures on smooth manifolds. Professor Li received an invitation from the World Scientific Publishing Company to write a book on the subject and the lecture notes of his course will be the basis for the book, titled "Moduli space of symplectic structures".

Professor Mitchell Luskin currently serves on the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Centre de Recherches Mathematiques (CRM), Universite de Montreal. Professor Luskin served on the Organizing Committee for the Fall 2002 program of the UCLA Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) on Mathematics in Nanoscale Science and Engineering, and was the chair of the Organizing Committee for the IPAM workshop on Modeling and Simulation for Materials held November 19-22, 2002. He also served on the Organizing Committee for the Caltech-IPAM Workshop on Molecular Modelling and Computation: Perspectives and Challenges held November 15-16, 2002 and the US/EU Meeting on Phase Transitions in Crystals at the University of Minnesota held April 11-12, 2003.

In April 2003, Professor Luskin delivered the Distinguished Lecture Series at the University of Iowa. He was an Invited Lecturer for a Spitalfield Day of the London Mathematical Society at the Newton Institute, University of Cambridge, May 13, 2003, as well as an Invited Lecturer at the following conferences: The 20th Biennial Conference on Numerical Analysis, University of Dundee, June 24, 2003; the Conference on Nonlinear Analysis and Numerics, Bonn, October 28, 2003; the Workshop on Hierarchical Modeling and Multiscale Simulation of Materials Interfaces, University of Maryland, October 30, 2003.

A note on Professor Luskin's reseach and teaching program entitled "Infinitesimal Machines Designed by the Mathematics of Shape" appears below in the Newsletter.

Professor Gennady Lyubeznik was a co-organizer, together with Luis Narvaez-Macarro from Universidad de Sevilla, of a special session on Differential Structures and Homological Methods in Commutative Algebra and Algebraic Geometry at the joint meeting of the AMS and the Spanish Mathematical Society. The meeting took place June 18 - 21, 2003 in Seville, Spain.

Professors Ezra Miller will be a principal speaker at the "Third Duke Mathematical Journal Conference", to be held on April 23--25, 2004 at Duke University. He is also a co-organizer, with Professor Victor Reiner and with Bernd Sturmfels from the University of California at Berkeley, for the Graduate Summer School and Research Program components of the upcoming Park City Math Institute (PCMI) on Geometric Combinatorics. This annual event, which this year will take place from July 11 through July 31, is planned, funded, and coordinated through the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS). The Summer School Lecturers will be Alexander Barvinok, University of Michigan; Sergey Fomin, University of Michigan; Robin Forman, Rice University; Mark Haiman, University of California at Berkeley; Robert MacPherson, Institute for Advanced Study; Richard Stanley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Michelle Wachs, University of Miami; and Guenter Ziegler, Technical University-Berlin. More information and further links can be found at http://www.admin.ias.edu/ma/program/index.html

Professor Duane Nykamp will be an invited speaker at the AIMS Fifth International Conference on Dynamical Systems and Differential Equations, session on "Computational Neuroscience: From Physiology to Mathematical Modelling". The conference will be held this coming June in Pomona.

Professor Peter Olver will be an invited plenary speaker at the following conferences: 6th International Workshop on Mathematics Mechanization, Shanghai, China, May, 2004; Joint Canadian Math Society and Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society, Halifax, Canada, June 2004; Ninth Meeting on Computer Algebra and Applications, Santander, Spain, July 2004. 13th School of Differential Geometry, Sao Paulo, Brazil, July, 2004. Red Raider Symposium, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, November, 2004. He was, or is, a member of organizing committees of the following conferences and workshops: Differential Invariants and Invariant Differential Equations, Banff Institute, Canada, 2003; IEEE Workshop on Variational, Geometric and Level Set Methods in Computer Vision, Nice, France, 2003; Geometry, Integrable Systems and Quantization, Varna, Bulgaria, 2004; Symmetry and Perturbation Theory, Cala Gonone, Sardinia, 2004; Integrable and Near-integrable Hamiltonian PDE, Fields Institute, Toronto, Canada, 2004; and Foundations of Computational Mathematics, Santander, Spain, 2005.

Professor Peter Polacik was a plenary speaker at Equadiff 2003, Hasselt, Belgium, July 22-26, 2003. This conference was a part of a series of conferences on differential equations organized every four years in Western Europe. Professor Polacik also was an invited speaker at the conference Singularities in PDEs, Bratislava, Slovakia, May 25-28, 2003, and at the Canadian Mathematical Society Summer Meeting, June 14-16, 2003.

Professor Emerita Marian Pour-El was a member of the Scientific Program Committee of CCA 2003 International Conference on Computability and Complexity in Analysis held in Cincinnati, August 28-30, 2003. She also gave an invited talk at the conference on her joint work with Ning Zhong on "Boundary Regularity and Computability".

Professor George Sell was a co-organizer, together with Russell Johnson, Rafael Obaya, and Yingfei Yi, of a Mini-Symposium on Non-autonomous Dynamics, which was held at the Equadiff 2003 International Conference in Belgium in July 2003. He is also a member of the Scientific Organizing Committees both for the International Conference on Difference Equations (ICEDA), which is scheduled for the University of Southern California Los Angeles in August 2004, as well as the ICEDA conference to be held in Munich Germany in July 2005. A special issue of the Journal of Difference Equations and Applications was dedicated in honor of Professor Sell's 65th birthday in 2003.

Regent's Professor Emeritus James Serrin has recently published an extensive review article in the Journal of Differential Equations, vol 196, pp 1-66, with title "The Strong Maximum Principle Revisited" (with P. Pucci, University of Perugia). He is also organizing a workshop at the University of Minnesota, June 23 -June 25, on the subject "New Developments in Nonlinear Elliptic Equations", with speakers from Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States. Serrin will also be a principal speaker at a conference in Gaeta this summer in honor of the 60th birthday of Haim Brezis, and will be the principal speaker at a meeting of the Mathematical Association of America at Ball State University in April. He is on the scientific committee for the Gaeta conference, and also on the scientific committee for a second conference in honor of Brezis to be held in Paris this summer.

Professor Alexander Voronov was a plenary speaker at the 3rd International Symposium on Quantum Theory and Symmetries held at the University of Cincinnati, September 10-14, 2003. Then, September 16-20, he delivered a mini-course on "String Topology and Beyond" at the Summer School on String Topology and Hochschild Homology, University of Almeria, Spain. During the Spring 2004 semester he is serving as a Stone Professor at Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, where he is teaching a graduate course on Operad Theory. He is organizing a special session on Homotopical Physics at the American Mathematical Society meeting in Lawrenceville, NJ, April 17-18, 2004. And he is serving on the Advisory Committee for the XXIII workshop on Geometric Methods in Physics, Bialowieza, Poland, June-July, 2004.

Professor Peter Webb was an invited lecturer at a workshop on Group Representations and Cohomology at Australian National University, Canberra, June 30 - July 4, 2003.

Professor Ofer Zeitouni was a co-organizer and a speaker at the 29-th Conference on Stochastic Processes and their Applications, held August 3-9, 2003, at Rio de Janeiro.

 

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