Category: Colloquia

Michigan Tech Hosts Copper Country Workshop on Applied Mathematics, Statistics, and Data Sciences

CAMS and the Department of Mathematics successfully organized the Copper Country Workshop on Applied Mathematics, Statistics, and Data Sciences, July 5-7, 2022 at Michigan Technological University. The goal of the workshop is to bring leading researchers to discuss the recent developments in applied mathematics, statistics, and data science, and build collaborations among the participants from different areas.

The workshop attracted 47 participants including faculty and students. There were 30 speakers from 19 universities including:

  • Auburn University
  • Brown University
  • Columbia University
  • The George Washington University
  • Iowa State University
  • Kansas State University
  • Michigan State University
  • Michigan Technological University
  • Missouri University of Science and Technology
  • Purdue University
  • Stevens Institute of Technology
  • University of Florida
  • University of Georgia
  • University of Michigan
  • University of Minnesota
  • University of Notre Dame
  • University of South Carolina
  • The University of Texas at San Antonio
  • York University

Sessions of note included:

  • High-Performance Spectral Methods for Scalable Graph Embedding and Robust Machine Learning by Zhuo Feng of Stevens Institute of Technology
  • Coupling Learning With Classical Computational Inversion by Kui Ren of Columbia University
  • Deterministic-Statistical Approach for Moving Sources With Sparse Partial Data by Yanfang Liu of The George Washington University
  • Learning Dirichlet-to-Neumann Maps From Randomly Sampled Points: A Consistency Result by Yang Yang of Michigan Technological University
  • Bayesian Hierarchical Modelling for Process Optimization by Min Wang of the University of Texas at San Antonio
  • Visualization of Mixed-featured Datasets by Fan Dai of Michigan Technological University

Visit the workshop website to see a list of all the session titles and speakers. To learn more about the Copper Country Workshop, please contact Michigan Tech’s Mathematical Sciences department chairperson Jiguang Sun.

Parallel Time Integration Workshop to be Hosted by Michigan Tech

Michigan Tech’s Department of Mathematical Sciences will host the NSF-CBMS Summer Workshop on Parallel Time Integration from August 1 – 5th, 2022. The free workshop will feature ten lectures by Martin J. Gander, Université de Genève, an expert in parallel time integration. The primary focus of the proposed parallel-in-time workshop is to educate and inspire researchers and students in new and innovative numerical techniques for the parallel-in-time solution of large-scale evolution problems on modern supercomputing architectures, and to stimulate further studies in their analysis and applications. This workshop aligns with the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) objective: “increase coherence between technology for modeling/simulation and data analytics.”

Image of Professor Gander
Professor Martin J. Gander, Université de Genève

Register for the workshop today. Registration closes on July 1, 2022.

More on the parallel-in-time workshop.

Computational simulations are a key part of scientific research for government, industry, and academia, complementing laboratory experimentation and theory.  However, changes in computer architectures are leading to future supercomputers that will have billions of processors, as opposed to millions today. Further, each individual processor will be no faster than individual processors today.  Thus, these next-generation machines will no longer automatically provide a speedup to existing computational simulations. New mathematical algorithms must be developed and deployed that can utilize this unprecedented number of processors.

One such class of mathematical algorithms, parallel-in-time methods, is the subject of this workshop.  In particular, parallel-in-time methods add a new dimension (time) of parallelism and thus allow existing computer models to be extended to next-generation supercomputers. The range of potential applications for parallel-in-time to dramatically speed up is vast, e.g., computational molecular dynamics (e.g., protein and DNA folding), computational biology (e.g., heart modeling), computational fluid dynamics (e.g., combustion, climate, and weather), and machine learning.

Using appropriate mathematical methodologies from the theory of partial differential equations in a functional analytic setting, numerical discretizations, integration techniques, and convergence analyses of these iterative methods, conference participants will be exposed to the numerical analysis of parallel-in-time methodologies and their implementations. The proposed topics include multiple shooting type methods, waveform relaxation methods, time-multigrid methods, and direct time-parallel methods. These lectures will be accessible to a wide audience from various disciplines, including mathematics, computer science and engineering.

About your lecturer, Professor Martin J. Gander

Professor Martin J. Gander is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. He is an internationally recognized expert in the area of Domain Decomposition Methods (DDM) and time-parallel integrators, among many other research interests. Professor Gander has published over 200 manuscripts and serves on the editorial boards of various journals, including SIAM Review, Computers and Mathematics with Applications, and the Electronic Transactions in Numerical Analysis. Professor Gander has also published two textbooks, Scientific Computing: an Introduction using Maple and MATLAB and Numerical Analysis of Partial Differential Equations using Maple and MATLAB.

Professor Gander is a highly accomplished and engaging lecturer, winning several teaching awards over his career. Professor Gander recently conducted a short course on Schwarz methods in August 2015, a short course on Time Parallel integration at the CEMRACS Summer School 2016: Numerical challenges in parallel scientific computing, and has given over 120 plenary lectures over his career. “In addition to being a leading researcher in the area of parallel time integrators, Professor Gander has influenced many lives through his commitment to training the next generation of scientists and engineers. We are so grateful that Professor Gander will be the principal lecturer at our NSF-CBMS summer school,” says Benjamin Ong, conference organizer and associate professor of mathematical sciences.

Thank you to our sponsors

The conference organizers, Professor Benjamin Ong (Michigan Technological University) and Professor Jacob Schroder (University of New Mexico) thank the sponsors for making this free conference with travel support possible: the National Science Foundation (NSF), Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences, Michigan Technological University, Igor Kliakhandler, and the Time-X H2020 project.

MIT Professor to Deliver Kliakhandler Lectures

stanleyThe Second Annual Kliakhandler Lectures will be held Sept. 29-30 at Michigan Tech. Richard Stanley of MIT will deliver the lectures which are sponsored by the Mathematical Sciences and funded by a generous gift from former faculty member Igor Kliakhandler.

The Kliakhandler lecture series brings a top mathematician to campus each year to give a pair of lectures.Stanley is a prolific mathematician who has won numerous honors, is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has won the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics’ George Pólya Prize in Applied Combinatorics, the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition from the American Mathematical Society and the Rolf Schock Prize for Mathematics.

His first lecture is from 5 to 6 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 29 in Dow 641. Stanley’s lecture will be “Plane Tilings,” in which he will discuss the challenges of filling a planar region with a given collection of shapes (tiles).  A jigsaw puzzle is a familiar type of tiling, though it is not very mathematical; decorative tile floors often use plane tiling to create an aesthetic effect. The physicist Roger Penrose created a family of tilings that are known as Penrose tilings.

Stanley will survey some interesting mathematics associated with plane tilings and discuss questions such as the following: Is there a tiling? If so, how many are there? If no tiling exists, how can we prove this? What special properties, such as symmetry, can a tiling possess? These questions involve such subjects as combinatorics, group theory, probability theory, number theory and computer science.

From 1 to 2 p.m. Friday, Sept. 30 in Fisher 138, Stanley will deliver a colloquium entitled “A Survey of Alternating Permutations.” Permutations are fundamental transformations in mathematics, and alternating permutations comprise one of the most important families of permutations. Stanley will discuss several aspects of the theory of alternating permutations and describe applications to topics such as group theory and geometry.

Nick Trefethen to Speak at Michigan Tech

Nick Trefethen of Oxford University will deliver a lecture
“Discrete or Continuous?” at 5:05 p.m. on Monday, April 27, in Fisher 325.

Trefethen has received many honors for this research in Numerical Analysis:

  • Fellow of the Royal Society
  • Member of the National Academy of Engineering
  • The Gold Medal from the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (UK)
  • The Naylor Prize from the London Mathematical Society

He is past-president of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and he has the distinction of being the first customer to buy a copy of Matlab.

Trefethen describes his talk as follows: “As old as any issue in science and mathematics is the polarity between discrete and continuous. The details change from century to century, but a synthesis still challenges us. In this talk I will comment on some of the long history and current state of interplay between these two ways of thinking.”

The public is welcome.

From Tech Today

Radial Basis Functions – Freedom from meshes in scientific computing: Developments and Applications

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Michigan Technological University
March 27, 2015
1:05 p.m.
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Radial Basis Functions – Freedom from meshes in scientific computing: Developments and Applications

Natasha Flyer

Institute of Mathematics Applied to Geosciences,
National Center for Atmospheric Research

Bengt Fornberg

University of Colorado
Boulder, Colorado

Flyer Fornberg-03-27-15

Radial basis functions method

Mathematical Sciences Colloquium
Michigan Technological University
March 26, 2015
1:05 p.m.
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A fast algorithm for distributing nodes with variable density

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Institute of Mathematics Applied to Geosciences,
National Center for Atmospheric Research

Flyer-03-26-15

Numerical Quadrature over the Surface of a Sphere

Bengt Fornberg

University of Colorado
Boulder, Colorado

Fornberg-03-26-15