Andrew Leach's Conference Summary

       Andrew Leach
       Ph.D. Student
       Applied Mathematics

       Conference Summary
       11th AIMS Conference on Dynamical Systems, Differential Equations, and Applications
       July 1 - July 5, 2016
       Orlando, FL

The Herbert E. Carter Travel Award provided me with the necessary support to participate in the 11th AIMS Conference on Dynamical Systems, Differential Equations, and Applications. The conference was held at the Hyatt Regency in Orlando, Florida from July 1st-5th, and was attended by some of the most prominent figures in Applied Mathematics. I was able to attend plenary talks from the likes of Stan Osher and Fields Medalist Martin Hairer. As the conference was widely attended, the symposiums that it had to offer were very diverse. I spent a lot of time in sessions focused on data assimilation and also uncertainty quantification, providing some insight into the current state of the art methods.

Much of my remaining time was spent at the symposium for Modern Applications of Mathematical and Computational Sciences, which I had the opportunity to present at. I covered recent work with my advisors Kevin Lin and Matthias Morzfeld on rare event simulation for stochastic differential equations. One of the audience members was a professor who hosted the Houston Summer School on Dynamical Systems which I had attended a few years back. The methods that we have developed are close to what he needed for one of his current projects, and we had an interesting discussion about how they could be applied.

Perhaps one of the exchanges that had the most significant impact was one with a post doc working on similar projects to my own. He pointed me towards two papers which are closely related to ongoing work, and may have saved me from retreading ground, and pointed me in a more productive direction.

I had a chance to reconnect with a professor from Arizona State University that has visited the department previously, as well as a former UA graduate student and now professor at University of New Mexico. There was discussion about reestablishing Los Alamos Days, a regular meeting of graduate students from a collection of universities (including the aforementioned) from the Southwest. Given the close proximity of some of these universities, and the precedence, it seems like it would be a missed opportunity not to follow up. I’m in touch with both professors, and I look forward to forging stronger connections between the universities.