Conference News
Overview of CSE13
SIAM’s largest conference to date, the 2013 SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering, was held in Boston last month. Over 1,370 attended the meeting, and the lectures and sessions were very well-received, inspiring a great deal of discussion.
Read Nick Higham’s overview of the meeting in text and pictures here.
Elliptic Curve Cryptography and Applications
At the SIAM Annual Meeting held in Minneapolis in July, Dr. Kristin Lauter of Microsoft Research discussed Elliptic Curve Cryptography as a mainstream primitive for cryptographic protocols and applications. The talk surveyed elliptic curve cryptography and its applications, including applications of pairing-based cryptography which are built with elliptic curves. Lauter also discussed its applications to privacy of electronic medical records, and implications for secure and private cloud storage and cloud computing.
Watch a video overview of the talk and an interview:
Mathematics in Finance: Systemic Risk
At the SIAM Annual Meeting held in Minneapolis in July, Dr. George Papanicolaou of Stanford University surveyed a topic of great relevance today—models for systemic risk and the implications that can be drawn from them. Laying out the picture of an evolving system with a large number of interconnected components, he described Systemic Risk as the probability of overall failure of the system. Papanicolaou spoke about the effect of electronic trading and automated exchanges increase in increased liquidity and risk, illustrating the significance of systemic risk in current mathematical finance research.
Watch a brief video overview of his talk and interview:
Math, image processing and movie special effects
At the SIAM Annual Meeting held in Minneapolis in July, Tony Chan of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology spoke about recent growth in the field of image processing due to the advent of inexpensive and integrated image capturing devices, which has led to massive data and novel applications. In a very interesting talk, he described how image processing has emerged not only as an application domain where computational mathematics provides ideas and solutions, but also in spurring new research directions. 2012 I.E. Block Lecturer Robert Bridson, in a very engaging lecture, demonstrated how a computer-generated effect, like a stormy ocean, is made to look real in movies by numerically solving physical equations describing the motion, bringing mathematics and scientific computing into the forefront of animation.
Watch a video recapping both talks and interviews with the speakers!
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View presentations from the SIAM Annual and Financial Math Meetings!
At the 2012 SIAM Annual Meeting held in July, over a thousand mathematicians and computational scientists gathered from all over the world in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to discuss the state of the art in a variety of disciplines in the mathematical sciences through invited presentations, prize lectures, minisymposia, and contributed papers and posters. The Conference on Financial Mathematics and Engineering–held jointly with the Annual Meeting–focused on research and practice in financial mathematics, computation, and engineering, fostering collaborations among mathematical scientists, statisticians, computer scientists, computational scientists, and researchers and practitioners in finance and economics, with the goal of encouraging the use of mathematical and computational tools in quantitative finance in the public and private sectors.
Presentation slides with synchronized audio for selected sessions from both the Annual (AN12) and the Financial Mathematics (FM12) meetings are now available on SIAM Presents. View and listen to interesting talks in a wide range of areas— from modeling of ocean dynamics, image processing, the math behind movie special effects, analysis of systemic risk, and stochastic control in finance to issues in mathematical publishing today.
In addition to the invited and prize lectures and select minisymposia, the tutorial on “Mathematical Modeling of Interest Rates: Challenges and New Directions” is also available.
You can go to direct links to view presentations from AN12 and FM12.
Visit the SIAM Presents page to view presentations and slides from more SIAM conferences.
SIAM Past President Doug Arnold on mathematical literature and scholarly publishing
At the SIAM Annual Meeting held in Minneapolis in July, SIAM Past President Douglas Arnold of the University of Minnesota addressed a very timely and relevant issue: problems facing scholarly publishing today, such as author misconduct and plagiarism, intentional manipulation of citation statistics, and the high price of journal subscriptions.
“Math literature is enduring,” he said, noting that citations in mathematical journals often go back decades, and emphasizing the need for mathematicians to take a stance on this important issue. “Refereeing is super-important in math because we believe in the truth.” He explained a few cases of plagiarism that should be very worrisome to the community, reinforcing the importance of tools like CrossCheck employed by SIAM Journals. He then turned his focus on impact factors and their skewed nature due to self-citations and self-references. Illustrating how impact factors can be greatly influenced by self-citations with a series of convincing graphs, he cautioned the audience to be more guarded about the authenticity of bibliometrics.
The final part of Dr. Arnold’s talk focused on his personal views on the influence of large commercial publishers and one in particular–Elsevier–which, in his opinion is affecting the publishing world with its non-competitive prices, journal bundling, and huge profit margins, all the while relying on unpaid volunteer labor. Lastly, he mentioned the need to redefine copyright laws in general, transferring more rights to authors and less to publishers. In a very engaging lecture, Dr. Arnold inspired a lot of food for thought about the future of mathematical publishing.
Watch a video recapping Dr. Arnold’s talk:
Travel Grants for MCA 2013
The American Mathematical Society (AMS) has received funds from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to provide partial travel support for up to sixty U.S. mathematicians attending the inaugural meeting of the Mathematical Congress of the Americas (MCA) to be held August 5-9, 2013 in Guanajuato, Mexico.
Instructions on how to apply for support are available on the AMS website here. The application period will be September 15-October 31, 2012. This travel grants program will be administered by the Membership and Programs Department of the AMS.
The program is open to U.S. mathematicians (who must be affiliated with a U.S. institution at the time of travel). It is expected that the program will provide travel support for both U.S.-based invited speakers (senior mathematicians) and early career mathematicians. Early career mathematicians (those within six years of their doctorate), women, and members of U.S. groups underrepresented in mathematics are especially encouraged to apply. Invited speakers from U.S. institutions to MCA 2013 should submit applications, if funding is desired.
Applications will be evaluated by a panel of mathematical scientists under the terms of a proposal submitted to the NSF by the AMS.
Mathematicians accepting grants for partial support of travel to MCA 2013 may not supplement them with any other NSF funds. Currently, it is the intention of the NSF’s Division of Mathematical Sciences to provide no additional funds on its other regular research grants for travel to MCA in 2013. However, an individual mathematician who does not receive a travel grant may use regular NSF grant funds, subject to the usual restrictions and prior approval requirements.
All information currently available about the MCA 2013 program, organization and registration procedure is located on the Congress website.
For questions or more information, contact Steven Ferrucci at sxf@ams.org, 800-321-4267, ext. 4113 or 401-455-4113.
SIAM is a sponsor of MCA 2013.
SIAM W. T. and Idalia Reid Prize awarded to Ruth Curtain
Ruth F. Curtain of the University of Groningen in The Netherlands is the 2012 recipient of the W. T. and Idalia Reid Prize.
First awarded by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in 1994, the prize recognizes outstanding work in, or other contributions to, the broadly defined areas of differential equations and control theory. The prize, endowed by the late Mrs. Idalia Reid to honor her husband, has been awarded annually since 2000, and may be given either for a single notable achievement or a collection of such achievements.
Professor Curtain is being recognized for her fundamental contributions to the theory of infinite dimensional systems and the control of systems governed by partial and delay differential equations. Dr. Curtain accepted her award of $10,000 and an engraved medal from SIAM President Nick Trefethen at the Prizes and Awards Luncheon and presented the associated prize lecture, entitled, Algebraic Properties of Riccati Equations, at the SIAM Annual Meeting held July 9-13 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
A professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Groningen, Curtain’s research interests are in infinite dimensional systems theory, control theory, and reciprocal systems.
After completing her early academic education at the University of Melbourne, Australia, earning her BSc, Diploma of Education, and MA in mathematics, Dr. Curtain went on to receive a PhD in applied mathematics at Brown University. She joined the mathematics section of the University of Groningen over three decades ago. She was elected a Fellow in IEEE for contributions to the control theory of stochastic systems and infinite-dimensional systems. She has served on the committee responsible for mathematics, computing science, and astronomy of the Dutch Science Research Council.
Roundup of Day 4 at AN12
Helmut Pottmann of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia, led the lineup of exciting talks Thursday with his discussion of Freeform Architecture and Discrete Differential Geometry. With the emergence of freeform structures, come interesting mathematical problems related to actual fabrication in contemporary architecture. Dr. Pottmann spoke about recent advances in geometric computing for such freeform architecture, with special emphasis on discrete differential geometry. Taking the audience through interesting structures such as meshes with planar quadrilateral faces and single curved panels, he discussed the many architectural applications of geometry. Read the rest of this entry »
AN12 Overview of Day 3
Valeria Simoncini talks about Model-Assisted Effective Large Scale Matrix Computations (Photo credit: Nick Higham)
Valeria Simoncini of Universita’ di Bologna, Italy, gave an account of recent advances in the solution of large scale matrices. Many advanced mathematical models require the solution of large algebraic linear systems, making these models computationally effective. Dr. Simoncini described several state-of-the-art iterative linear system solvers in an invited talk titled Model-Assisted Effective Large Scale Matrix Computations. Examples included matrices and vectors which inherit spectral properties of underlying continuous operators. Read the rest of this entry »