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In June 2009 the National Science Foundation awarded Professor Richard S. Ellis a Research Opportunity Award for Peter T. Otto as a supplement to his current NSF grant. Peter is a former graduate student of Richard’s and a current collaborator, who has worked with him on five papers. Peter is an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics atWillamette University, an undergraduate institution in Salem, OR. The aim of the Research Opportunity Award is to support research in undergraduate institutions such as Willamette University. In addition, on October 29, 2009 Richard gave a talk at the Statistics and Probability Seminar in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Boston University. His talk was an introduction to the theory of large deviations entitled What Is the Most Likely Way for an Unlikely Event To Happen?
The Fall 2009 Arbeitsgemeinschaft was held during the period October 4–10 at the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach (MFO), focusing on the topic of minimal surfaces. Professor Rob Kusner gave the opening lecture on Conjugate Constructions, Jenkins-Serrin Graphs and the Scherk Surfaces and Professor William Meeks, a co-organizer of the workshop, led a problem session during the second evening. At the end of the workshop the participants selected the topic, coarse geometry and geometric group theory, and the potential organizers for the Spring 2010 Arbeitsgemeinschaft at MFO.
Professor Emeritus Floyd Williams gave a 40-minute invited talk at the AMS special session on Mathematical Aspects of Spectral Problems Related to Physics, held at Baylor University in Waco, Texas during the period October 16–18, 2009. The title of his talk was Casimir Energy and Local Zeta Function for Higher Rank Symmetric Spaces. Floyd’s student, Jennie D’Ambroise, give a 20-minute invited talk at this AMS special session. The title of her talk was Elliptic Functions in Cosmology.
Professor Richard S. Ellis has signed a publication contract for his book, Blinding Pain, Simple Truth: Changing Your Life Through Buddhist Meditation. It will be published by Rainbow Books, an independent publisher founded in 1979. The book describes how Buddhist teachings and daily meditation can empower readers to heal the suffering caused by physical and emotional pain. As the book shows, Buddhist teachings also provide a new lens for reading the Bible, yielding fresh insights that speak in surprisingly relevant ways to spiritual seekers and to those who want to heal themselves. Further information about the book is available online <http://www.math.umass.edu/~rsellis/Blinding-Pain-Simple-Truth.html>.
Professor Panos Kevrekidis had a busy summer. He visited the University of Heidelberg during the months of July and August, having been granted a two-year extension of his research fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (for summers 2009 and 2010). During this time frame, Panos also visited and presented his recent work on discrete nonlinear Schrödinger equations at the University of Munich. Together with the nonlinear dynamics group at the University of Seville, he co-organized the workshop entitled LENCOS: Localized Excitations in Nonlinear Complex Systems. In the workshop, Panos presented his work on dark solitons and their interactions in connection with recent experiments on Bose-Einstein condensates. Finally, during the month of July, his second book entitled The Discrete Nonlinear Schrödinger Equation: Mathematical Analysis, Numerical Computations and Physical Perspectives was published by Springer, and the special volume of Physica D on Nonlinear Phenomena on Degenerate Quantum Gases, which he co-edited, was published by Elsevier.
On September 14, 2009, Professor Rob Kusner kicked off the fall 2009 Temple University colloquium series with a talk entitled Tiling Surfaces, Flat Metrics, and Abel’s Theorem. The following day he lectured in their Contact and Hyperbolic Geometry Seminar on Moduli Spaces of CP^1 Structures and CMC Surfaces.
Professor William Meeks reports on the following activities that took place since June 2009.
1. He gave talks at two geometry conferences in Spain, one in Nerja and the other in Granada.
2. He gave two talks in the geometry seminar at the Korean Institute for Advance Study, one in June and the other in July.
3. He gave one of the plenary talks at the International Conference in Geometry in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in August.
4. In September he gave a talk in the geometry seminar at the University of Granada and a colloquium at the University of Bologna.
5. In the first week of October he gave a talk at a workshop at Oberwolfach, Germany. He is also one of the two organizers of this workshop.
Professor John Staudenmayer and his collaborators Professors Freedson and Braun in the Department of Kinesiology at UMass Amherst were awarded a $950,000 NIH grant entitled Advancing Physical Activity Measurement Using Pattern Recognition Techniques. This grant was funded through the NIH Challenge Grant stimulus-funding mechanism. NIH received about 21,000 applications for these grants, and only 200 were funded.
On June 18, 2009 Professor Brian Burrell presented Grand Rounds in Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital. The title of the talk was Brainspotting: What Good is a Collection of Famous Brains? The talk was given at the famous Ether Dome, which is the operating theater in which an anesthetic was first used during a surgery. He also wrote a short piece for Forbes.com entitled Words We Live By: Some aphorisms evolve with changing times, but more often get stuck in time. The piece is available on their website as part of a special edition. The URL is http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/12/brian-burrell-quotations-opinions-burrell.html.
On June 30, 2009 Professor Richard S. Ellis gave an invited talk in the Department of Mathematics at University of Rome. His talk was an introduction to the theory of large deviations and was entitled What Is the Most Likely Way for an Unlikely Event To Happen?
Professor Markos Katsoulakis reports on the following activities during the summer of 2009.
1. Markos received a $325,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy for a proposal entitled Multiscale Mathematics for Biomass Conversion to Renewable Hydrogen.
2. Markos was an invited speaker at the ESPRC Symposium Capstone Conference held at Warwick University and Warwick Mathematics Institute in the United Kingdom, during the period June 30 – July 3, 2009. The title of his talk was Hierarchical and Multi-Level Coarse-Graining Methods.
3. Markos was an invited lecturer at the Summer School and Conference on Kinetics and Statistical Methods for Complex Particle Systems. This two-week summer program was held during July 2009 in Lisbon, Portugal. The week of July 13–17 featured a summer school for graduate students and postdocs at which Markos and four other people spoke. During the week of July 20–24 a workshop took place featuring lectures on recent progress in this field. Markos’s four talks are available at the conference website http://www.utaustinportugal.org/Events.aspx?event=237.
4. Markos was an invited speaker at the Conference on Mathematical Challenges Motivated by Multi-Phase Materials: Analytical, Stochastic and Discrete Aspects, which was held in Anogeia, Crete, Greece during the period June 21–26, 2009. The title of his talk was Hierarchical Pattern Discovery in Many-Body Complex Stochastic Systems.
5. Markos was an invited panel moderator at the Opening Workshop of the Stochastic Dynamics Program for 2009–2010 at SAMSI during the period August 30 – September 2, 2009.
Professor Daeyoung Kim organized a special session for contributed papers on the Mixture Model and Its Applications at the 1st IMS Asia Pacific Rim Meeting, which was held at Seoul National University in Seoul, South Korea during the period June 28 – July 1, 2009. He also gave a talk in this session, entitled Likelihood Confidence Sets and Empirical Identifiability in the Mixture Model. On August 2, 2009 Daeyoung gave a contributed talk at the Joint Statistical Meeting in Washington, D.C. The title of the talk was Data-based Assessment of Asymptotic Label Identifiability in Mixture Models.
During June 2009, visiting professor Karsten Grosse-Brauckmann and Professor Rob Kusner, who was his host here during the past year, lectured on their joint work concerning constant mean curvature surfaces at Lehigh’s Journal of Differential Geometry conference. During August, Rob participated at the workshop on Symplectic and Contact Topology at MSRI in Berkeley and also visited Stanford University and nearby Google.
Professor Michael Lavine was awarded a grant by the National Institutes of Health of approximately $800,000. The purpose of the grant is to study statistical aspects of neocortical hemodynamics during epileptic activity in primates and humans. The money will allow the department to hire a postdoc for five years.
Professor Franz Pedit gave an invited talk entitled Bending CMC Cylinders at A Harmonic Map Fest honoring J. C. Wood and taking place in Cagliari, Italy during the period September 7–10, 2009. He gave a second invited talk with the same title at the workshop on Variational Problems of Higher Order in Geometry, which took place at the Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum fuer Informationstechnik Berlin during the period September 16–18, 2009.
During the period August 24–28, 2009 Professor Jenia Tevelev gave a three-lecture minicourse entitled Tropical Elimination Theory at the Introductory Workshop of the Tropical Algebraic Geometry Program at MSRI in Berkeley. His paper entitled Equations for M_{0,n}, written jointly with Sean Keel, was published by the International Journal of Mathematics, volume 20, number 9 (2009), 1–26. His paper Stable Pair, Tropical, and Log Canonical Compact Moduli of Del Pezzo Surfaces, written jointly with Paul Hacking and Sean Keel, was published by Inventiones mathematicae, volume 178, number 1 (2009), 173–228.
On August 18, 2009 Visiting Assistant Professor Giancarlo Urzua gave an invited talk in the workshop on Algebraic Surfaces and Related Topics, held at the Pohang Mathematics Institute in Pohang, Korea. The webpage for the conference is http://math.postech.ac.kr/~wlog/workshop/.
Professor Robin Young was an invited participant in the IMA’s summer program, Nonlinear Conservation Laws and Applications, held during the period July 13–31, 2009 in Minneapolis, MN. He presented two posters on his recent work on Strong Wave Interactions and Vacuums and his joint work on Periodic Solutions of the Euler Equations with Blake Temple. Also, the National Science Foundation awarded Robin a three-year, $125,000 grant entitled Periodic and Large Amplitude Solutions for the Compressible Euler Equations.
Professor HongKun Zhang was awarded a National Science Foundation grant. The grant starts in August 2009 and ends in July 2012.
Professor Panos Kevrekidis had a busy end of the semester. On April 14, 2009 he gave an invited talk on his research on discrete nonlinear Schrödinger and Klein-Gordon equations at MIT. He subsequently presented his recent work on dark solitons and their interactions in the AMS sectional meeting at Worcester Polytechnic Institute on April 25. More recently, he also gave invited presentations at the SIAM Dynamical Systems Meeting in Snowbird, Utah on May 19 and at Caltech on May 22.
Professor Daeyoung Kim gave an invited talk in the New Researchers Session at the Symposium on New Directions in Asymptotic Statistics, which was held at the Georgia Center in Athens, Georgia during the period May 15–16, 2009. The title of his talk was Visualizing Asymptotics: Using Confidence Distribution Sampling to Visualize Confidence Sets. On May 21 Daeyoung gave an informal, invited talk in the research group of Professor Hernando Ombao in the Center for Statistical Sciences in the Department of Community Health at Brown University. The title of his talk was Introduction to the Finite Mixture Model.
On May 29, 2009 the Dartmouth College Geometry and Topology Seminar, led by Craig Sutton, former UMass graduate student and now Dartmouth College assistant professor, heard Professor Rob Kusner deliver a talk entitled Moduli Spaces of CP^1-Structures and CMC Surfaces in R^3.
On May 5, 2009 Professor Michael Lavine delivered the address Spike Trains and Human Brains at the annual meeting of the Mount Holyoke chapter of Sigma Xi.
Professor Franz Pedit was invited to the workshop Surface Theory: Research in Pairs, which will be held at Kloster Benediktbeuern, Germany, during the period July 5–11, 2009. This workshop has no scheduled talks; upon arrival, participants will be asked to present their latest research ideas.
Professor Eric Sommers, on sabbatical for the spring semester, spent the month of April 2009 at the University of Poitiers in France as Professeur Invité. While he was there, he gave a talk entitled Une Dualité pour les Orbites Nilpotentes. Eric is currently spending May and June at the Newton Institute in Cambridge, UK as a participant in the program Algebraic Lie Theory. He gave a one-hour talk in the program entitled Two Partially Ordered Sets Arising from Nilpotent Orbits. Together with Molly Fenn (Ph.D. 2008, now at North Carolina State), Eric organized a special session at the April AMS meeting at North Carolina State. The session was entitled Computational Methods in Lie Theory. Current Ph.D. student Chris McDaniel gave one of the twenty-minute talks. The title of his talk was The Strong Lefschetz Property for Co-Invariant Rings of Finite Reflection Groups.
Professor Emeritus Edward Connors chaired the AMS Panel that awarded the Karl Menger Prize at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, which was held in Reno, NV during the period May 11–15, 2009. This prize is awarded for the project that is judged as the best for its mathematical content. Ed continues to serve on the College Board Committee that administers the Calculus College Level Examination Program.
In April 2009 Visiting Assistant Professor Zhigang Han was selected as a recipient of the Residential First Year Experience (RFYE) Student Choice Award. The award is given to a member of the UMass Amherst community for making a significant impact on the lives of first-year students. On April 26, 2009 he gave a talk at the AMS Eastern Section Meeting in the Special Session on Symplectic and Contact Topology, which was held in Worcester, MA. The title of the talk was A Nonextension Result on the Spectral Metric.
Professor Rob Kusner was the keynote speaker at the Friends Select School Math and Science symposium, held on April 22, 2009 at his alma mater in his hometown, Philadelphia. Rob narrated two films about sphere eversions under the Earth-Day-inspired title What's the Best Way To Turn a Planet Inside-Out? On April 2 Rob delivered a colloquium lecture in the department entitled Moduli Spaces of Complex Projective Structures and Constant-Mean-Curvature Surfaces in R3.
Professor Michael Lavine has been awarded a five-year, $600,000 NSF grant through Five Colleges for an innovative program that will train three postdocs in statistical consulting while providing teaching in statistics at the colleges. Each of the postdocs will be supported for three years. The title of the project is An Innovative Model for Workforce Development in Statistics.
Professor Andrea Nahmod has been awarded a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University for the academic year 2009-2010. Professor Nahmod will spend the year in residence in Cambridge, MA. As the appointment letter states, she will join a class that included fellows of extraordinary breadth and accomplishment. They come from across the country and abroad, women and men at different stages of their careers representing different academic, professional and artistic fields. Further details about the fellowship are available in In the Loop.
During the current semester Professor Jenia Tevelev was a member at MSRI during the algebraic geometry program. He gave a talk at MSRI in a workshop on Combinatorial, Enumerative and Toric Geometry, which took place during the period March 23–27, 2009. His talk was entitled Compactifications of Subvarieties of Tori.
On March 27, 2009 Professor George Avrunin gave an invited talk at the State of the Art in Testing and Analysis Day at North Carolina State University. The title of the talk was Applying Software Analysis Techniques to Healthcare.
On March 19, 2009 Professor Erin Conlon gave an invited talk in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Boston University. The title of the talk was Bayesian Meta-Analysis Models for Microarray Studies.
Professor Paul Gunnells recently gave two talks. On March 30, 2009 he spoke at the MIT Number Theory seminar, where he gave a talk entitled Weyl Group Multiple Dirichlet Series. On March 16, he gave a talk in the Brown Algebra seminar entitled Elliptic Curves and Modular Forms over Q(zeta_5). This second talk discussed a joint project with Professor Farshid Hajir, who is also a member of the department, and with Professor Dan Yasaki, a former UMass Amherst postdoc who is now at University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Professor Panos Kevrekidis together with post-doctoral fellow George Theocharis and graduate students Kody Law and Chenyu Wang recently attended the 6th IMACS Conference on Nonlinear Waves, held during the period March 23–26, 2009 in Athens, GA. All four researchers delivered talks at the conference. Panos also organized a mini-symposium on nonlinear Schrödinger equations and their applications jointly with collaborator Ricardo Carretero of San Diego State University. Kody received a student-paper prize for his research work and presentation on vortex dynamics in Bose-Einstein condensates.
On March 17, 2009 Professor Daeyoung Kim gave a talk at the meeting of the ENAR (Eastern North American Region/International Biometric Society) in San Antonio, Texas. The title of the talk was Simulation-based Visualization of Inference Functions.
On March 19, 2009 Professor Rob Kusner lectured on Moduli Spaces of CMC Surfaces and Complex Projective Structures in the Geometry and Topology Seminar at the University of Pennsylvania.
On March 20, 2009 Professor Michael Lavine gave an invited talk in the Department of Biostatistics at Harvard University. The title of the talk was Subjective Likelihood For An Assessment of Climate Change in the Ocean.
Professor Emeritus Floyd Williams was invited to be the first speaker in a Distinguished Lecture Series at Medgar Evers College and also to speak at the New York Topology Seminar. Because the talk had information on topological deformation of black holes, it was decided that he give the same talk at the same time to both groups. Entitled Three Tenors: Ramanujan, Rademacher, and Einstein – a Convergence of Their Music, the talk was presented on February 19, 2009 in Brooklyn, NY.
Professor Robin Young recently gave four talks on his research. On November 18, 2008 he gave a talk at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta entitled On Shock-Free Periodic Solutions for the Euler Equations. The talk described his joint work with Blake Temple concerning progress on the long-standing question of the existence of periodic solutions for gas dynamics. On December 5, 2008 he gave two talks at Pennsylvania State University. The first, entitled Towards Shock-Free Periodic Solutions for the Euler Equations, discussed his joint work with Blake Temple. The second was entitled Interactions of Strong Shocks. On January 5, 2009 Robin participated in a special session on Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations and Applications at the AMS/SIAM/MAA Joint National Meeting in Washington, DC, where he again presented his joint work with Blake Temple.
Professor Paul Gunnells presented the talk On the Cohomology of Congruence Subgroups of SL(4,Z) at the conference Automorphic Representations, Automorphic L-Functions and Arithmetic, which took place January 19–23, 2009 at the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Kyoto, Japan.
Professor Markos Katsoulakis and Professor Bruce Turkington were invited speakers at a conference honoring Andrew J. Majda's 60th birthday, held during the period January 15–24, 2009 at Fudan University in Shangai, China. The title of Markos’s talk was Hierarchical and Multi-Level Coarse-Graining Methods, and the title of Bruce’s talk was An Optimization Approach to Statistical Closure of Underresolved Hamiltonian Dynamics. Andrew Majda is a Morse Professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences USA. He is the recipient of the National Academy of Science Prize in Applied Mathematics, the John von Neumann Prize of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the Gibbs Prize of the American Mathematical Society. The conference website is http://math.fudan.edu.cn/science/Conference/ICCAM/.
Professor Markos Katsoulakis was an invited speaker at the Max-Planck Institute in Leipzig Germany, where he participated in the conference on Analysis of Stochastic Surface Evolution: From Microscopic Models to Large Scale Behaviour. The conference took place during the period January 27-31, 2009, and the relevant website is http://www.mis.mpg.de/index.php?id=3309. The title of Markos’s talk was Mathematical Strategies and Error Quantification in the Coarse-Graining of Many-Body Stochastic Systems.
On January 16, 2009 Rob Kusner delivered a talk at the Applied Math and Computational Science Colloquium at the University of Pennsylvania. His topic was Moduli Spaces of CMC Surfaces and Complex Projective Structure.
On January 15, 2009 Professor Michael Lavine gave a seminar talk in the Department of Statistics and Applied Probability at UC Santa Barbara. The title of his talk was Subjective Likelihood. He also participated in a workshop held at NCEAS, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, during the period January 13–17, 2009. The title of his talk was Inference for Mechanistic Models.
In November 2008 Professor William Meeks was one of seven speakers at the annual Current Developments in Mathematics Conference at Harvard University. In December 2008 he gave a colloquium talk at the University of Notre Dame, and in January 2009 he visited the University of Warwick, where he gave a colloquium talk and a talk in the analysis seminar.
Professor Franz Pedit will give a colloquium talk at Notre Dame University on February 27, 2009. The title of his talk is Flowing Constant Mean Curvature Cylinders into Tori.
Professor Eric Sommers gave a talk entitled A Duality for Nilpotent Orbits at the Workshop on Lie Groups, Lie Algebras, and Their Representations at UC-Riverside. The workshop took place during the period January 17–18, 2009.
On January 2, 2009 Professor HongKun Zhang gave a two-hour seminar talk at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. The title of her talk was Correlations Decay by Coupling in Billiards.
Professor Franz Pedit gave a one-hour plenary talk entitled Global Aspects of Integrable Surface Geometry at the 16th Osaka City University International Academic Symposium 2008 on Riemann Surfaces, Harmonic Maps and Visualization. The symposium took place during the period December 15–20, 2008.
Professor Eric Sommers gave a talk entitled A Duality for Nilpotent Orbits at the Taipei Workshop for Lie Theory at the Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. The workskop took place during the period December 28–30, 2008.
Professor Jenia Tevelev gave talks at the Brown University Algebraic Geometry Seminar on November 21, 2008 and at the MIT-Harvard Algebraic Geometry Seminar on December 2, 2008. The title of both talks was Effective Divisors and Curves on Moduli Spaces of Curves.
On November 14, 2008 Professor Paul Gunnells gave a talk entitled Weyl Group Multiple Dirichlet Series in the Everytopic seminar at Brandeis University.
On November 13, 2008 Professor Daeyoung Kim gave an invited talk in the Statistics and Probability Seminar in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Boston University. The title of his talk was Mixture Inference at the Weak Identifiability.
In November 2008 Professor Rob Kusner delivered two lectures at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana. His colloquium lecture was entitled Triangulations of Surfaces, Flat Structures, and Abel’s Theorem, and his Felix Klein Seminar lecture the following day was entitled Moduli Spaces of Complex Projective Structures and CMC Surfaces. The latter talk was also the topic of a lectures series by Rob at GANG in November.
Professor Michael Lavine recently joined the editorial board of the Journal of Probability and Statistics, a new, on-line journal.
Professor Franz Pedit gave an invited plenary talk at Osaka City University International Academic Symposium on Riemann Surfaces, Harmonic Maps and Visualization, which took place during the period December 15–20, 2008.
On November 13, 2008 Professor Emeritus Floyd Williams gave an invited colloquium lecture at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. The title of his lecture was Three Tenors: Ramanujan, Rademacher, and Einstein — a Convergence of Their Music.
On October 2, 2008 Professor Tom Braden gave a colloquium at Reed College entitled The Geometry of Bar-and-Joint Machines.
On November 1, 2008 Professor Markos Katsoulakis attended the workshop on Scientific Challenges in Solar Energy Conversion and Storage, which was held at the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications in Minneapolis, MN. He also gave an invited talk at the Mathematical Biosciences Institute workshop on Multiscale Methods in Biology held during the period November 2–4, 2008.
Professor Michael Lavine gave the following six talks during October: What Is Bayesian Statistics and Why Everything Else Is Wrong? at Haverford College; Spike Trains and Human Brains at Haverford College and Smith College; and State Space Models for Optical Images of the Brain During Surgery at Penn State University, University of Pennsylvania, and Virginia Tech. Professor Lavine was a Distinguished Visitor at Haverford College.
Professor Eyal Markman and Professor Jenia Tevelev organized a Special Session on Algebraic Geometry during the AMS 2008 Fall Eastern Section Meeting in Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, which took place October 11–12, 2008. They had an excellent line-up of speakers giving one-hour talks on current trends in algebraic geometry. The speakers included UMass postdocs Sukhendu Mehrotra and Giancarlo Urzua. The titles of their talks were Deformations of Fourier-Mukai Equivalences (Mehrotra) and Simply Connected Random Surfaces (Urzua). Eyal Markman gave a talk entitled Modular Galois Covers Associated to Symplectic Resolutions of Singularities. The full program with abstracts is available at http://www.ams.org/amsmtgs/2154_program_ss1.html.
During the period October 14–17, 2008 Professor Nathaniel Whitaker participated in a panel at a conference at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, CA. The panel was entitled Promoting Diversity at the Graduate Level in Mathematics: a National Forum.
On October 15, 2008 Professor Emeritus Floyd Williams addressed two sixth grades classes at the STEM Middle Academy in Springfield, MA; STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. This new school, which consists of 100 students, all of them sixth graders, has been heavily advertised on television. In his address Floyd spoke to about half the students in the school as well as teachers regarding careers in science and mathematics, applications of science and mathematics to everyday life, and the development of good study habits. He also entertained a wide range of questions.
On October 24, 2008 Professor HongKun Zhang gave a 45-minute talk at the Semi-Annual Workshop in Dynamical Systems and Related Topics at Penn State University. Her talk was entitled Decay of Correlations for Hyperbolic Systems with Singularities.
Professor Paul Gunnells attended the workshop Number Theory and Physics at the Crossroads, which took place September 21–26, 2008 at the Banff International Research Station in Banff, Alberta, Canada. He gave a talk entitled Weyl Group Multiple Dirichlet Series.
Professor Emeritus Jim Humphreys gave one of three short courses, which were presented September 15–19, 2008 at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. under the auspices of LMS-EPSRC. The overall theme was Algebraic Groups and Related Topics, and Jim’s lectures were entitled Modular Representations of Lie Algebras. Students came from universities in the U.K. and elsewhere in the European Union. Further information is available at http://web.mat.bham.ac.uk/S.M.Goodwin/shortcourse/.
Professor Markos Katsoulakis is an invited speaker at the conference Stochastic Differential Equations: Models and Numerics, which will be held October 20–22, 2008 in Stockholm, Sweden at the Royal Institute of Technology.
During the period July 21–26, 2008 Professor Eduardo Cattani attended the conference on Algebraic Geometry, D-modules, Foliations and Their Interactions, which was held in Buenos Aires, Argentina. At the conference he gave a plenary talk entitled Mixed Lefschetz Theorems and Hodge-Riemann Bilinear Relations: Geometry and Combinatorics.
Professor Emeritus Edward Connors was named chair of the Karl Menger Prize Committee of the American Mathematical Society. This three-member committee is charged to select the winners in mathematics at the International Science and Engineering Fair sponsored by Intel. Several past winners of this competition for scientifically talented, secondary-school youth have eventually won Nobel Prizes and other prestigious honors.
Professor Richard S. Ellis and Professor Bruce Turkington were both invited lecturers at Ecole d’Ete de Physique Theorique in Les Houches, France. The aim of this month-long summer school was to present recent developments in the theoretical and experimental study of long-range, interacting systems. Twelve lecturers, approximately sixty graduate and postdoctoral students, and a number of other visitors participated. Richard lectured on the theory of large deviations and applications to statistical mechanics during the period August 5–8, 2008, and Bruce lectured on the statistical mechanics of two-dimensional turbulence and its geophysical applications during the period August 18–22, 2008.
Professor Paul Gunnells spoke at the workshop on Multiple Dirichlet Series and Applications to Automorphic Forms, which took place August 4–8, 2008 at the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Professor Markos Katsoulakis received a CDI-Type II grant from the National Science Foundation for $1,600,000. The participating institutions are UMass Amherst, University of Delaware, and University of Tennessee. The title of the grant is Collaborative Research CDI-Type II: Hierarchical Stochastic Algorithms for Materials Engineering. That the competition for these grants was extremely keen can be seen from the fact that throughout all the science and engineering divisions of NSF only seven such grants were funded. A new NSF initiative, CDI is an acronym for Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation.
Taking advantage of his stay at the University of Heidelberg as a Humboldt Fellow, Professor Panos Kevrekidis had a very busy summer. During the period July 21–24, 2008, he attended the conference on Nonlinear Waves in Rome, then went to Porto for the Nonlinear Science and Complexity meeting held there during the period July 27–30, and finally traveled to Athens for the Nonlinear Science and Complexity Summer School and Workshop held there during the period July 30 – August 2. In these meetings he delivered three different lectures on the following topics: discrete nonlinear Schroedinger equations and their solitary waves in Rome, double well potentials in optics and atomic physics in Porto, and examples of discreteness from granular media, layered optical media, and Bose-Einstein condensates in Athens.
During June and July, 2008 Professor Rob Kusner led a workshop at the Aspen Center for Physics on the Geometry of Condensed Matter. Earlier in June, he traveled to the University of Utah and to MSRI in Berkeley to work with collaborators. Later in July he delivered a plenary lecture at the IMA workshop on Geometrical Singularities and Singular Geometries and made several shorter presentations there as well. On his return trip, he visited the Liquid Crystal Institute at Kent State University, where he led a morning-long discussion on the Geometry and Topology of Blue Phases.
During the summer of 2008 Professor William Meeks gave talks at a geometry conference in Rome, in the geometry seminar at the University of Granada in Granada, Spain, at the conference on group actions at UMass Amherst, and in the geometry seminar at IMPA in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In November he will give colloquium talks at UMass Amherst and at Brandeis University.
Professor Franz Pedit gave the following four invited talks: Global Aspects of Integrable Surface Geometry at the conference on Recent Advances in Geometry and Topology of Surfaces, La Sapienza, Rome, Italy, May 28–30, 2008; Global Aspects of Integrable Surface Geometry at the conference on Conformal Geometry: Invariant Theory and the Variational Method, Station Biologique de Roscoff (CNRS), Roscoff , France, June 30 – July 4, 2008; Why are Soap Bubbles Round? for the Children University Program at Tuebingen University, June 17, 2008; and Geometry and Space for the Summer University Program at Tuebingen University, July 8, 2008. He also attended a meeting at the Mathematics Research Institute in Oberwolfach, Germany on Geometry, July 28 – August 1, 2008.
Professor Jenia Tevelev participated in the conference on Geometric Invariant Theory, which was held in Goettingen, Germany during the period June 2–6, 2008, and in the workshop on Classical Algebraic Geometry, which was held at the Mathematics Research Institute in Oberwalfach, Germany during the period June 9-13, 2008. The title of his talks at both the conference and the workshop was Chow, Moduli-Theoretic, and Tropical Quotients of Grassmannians. His paper entitled Elimination Theory for Tropical Varieties, written jointly with Bernd Sturmfels, was published in Mathematical Research Letters, volume 15, number 3 (2008).
During the period June 16–27, 2008 Professor Emeritus Floyd Williams presented a Graduate Workshop at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) at the University of California, Berkeley. The workshop, entitled A Window into Zeta and Modular Physics, was attended by 33 gifted graduate students. It featured two daily lectures and a speaker’s seminar in which four invited speakers gave advanced lectures on their current research. The workshop also featured special lectures by graduate students including Floyd’s two graduate students, Shabnam Beheshti and Jennie D’Ambroise. Shabnam’s lecture was entitled How a Soliton Illuminates a Black Hole, and Jennie’s lecture was entitled On Relating d-Dimensional Cosmology to Bose-Einstein Condensates. Floyd’s lecture at the speaker’s seminar was entitled Quantum Corrections to Black Hole Entropy Via a Deformation of the Patterson-Selberg Zeta Function. Given the apparent success of the workshop, MSRI invited Floyd to edit a book entitled A Window into Zeta and Modular Physics. To be published by MSRI, the book will feature the daily lectures, the lectures given at the speaker’s seminar, and the four special lectures by graduate students.
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