Colloquium

Event Description: Juan G. Restrepo, Postdoc with Alain Karma at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Complex Systems, Northeastern University Dynamics on complex networks: synchronization, percolation, and the dynamical importance of nodes and links. There has been much recent interest in studying dynamical processes on networks due to the realization...

Event Description: Cleve Moler, Author of MATLAB and Founder of MathWorks Evolution of MATLAB We show how MATLAB has evolved over the last 25 years from a simple matrix calculator to a powerful technical computing environment. We demonstrate several examples of MATLAB applications. We conclude with a few comments about...

Event Description: Bob Eisenberg, Department of Molecular Biophysics & Physiology, Rush University Medical Center Ion Channels: Devices for Atomic Control of Molecular Transport Protein channels conduct ions through a narrow tunnel of fixed charge and act as gatekeepers for cells and cell compartments. Hundreds of types of channels are studied...

Event Description: Dongbin Xiu, Department of Earth And Atmospheric Sciences, Purdue University Efficient methods for numerical simulations with uncertainty Most of the research efforts in scientific computing so far have been in developing efficient algorithms for different applications, assuming ideal inputs with precisely defined computational domains. Recently, there has been...

Event Description: Webster Cash, Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Scienes (APS), University of Colorado Boulder Struggling with the mathematics of diffraction and the search for life in the universe Our best hope of finding evidence of life in the Universe is to study the Earth-like planets around nearby stars. Spectra...

Event Description: Natasha Flyer, Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences (IMAGe), NCAR Modeling simple atmospheric flows on the sphere using radial basis functions Since the early 1990s, radial basis functions (RBFs) have been applied to solve simple elliptical and mixed parabolic partial differential equations (PDEs). Not until 2003 was the...

Event Description: Bengt Fornberg, Department of Applied Mathematics, CU Boulder Radial basis functions for solving PDEs - some recent developments Radial basis functions (RBFs) originated in the 1970s as a method for interpolating scattered data. More recently, both our knowledge about RBFs and their range of applications have grown tremendously...

Event Description: Sheldon Newhouse, Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Scienes (APS), University of Colorado Boulder What we do and do not know about simple dynamical systems It is well-known that simple dynamical systems can have complicated orbit structures. We describe some recent progress in understanding the structures of polynomial maps...

Event Description: Nathan C. Thompson, CEO & Founder of Spectra Logic Corporation From Numerical Analysis to the Numerical Boardroom This highly interactive presentation will trace the 24 year business history of Nathan Thompson from being one of Dr. Curry’s first students as a young mathematics professor at the University of...

Event Description: Peter D. Lax, Courant Institute of Mathematial Sciences, New York University Mathematics and physics are different enterprises; physics is looking for the laws of nature, mathematics is trying to invent the structures and prove the theorems of mathematics. The two endeavors have nevertheless always been closely linked. In...