Faculty Development Grant Report
Rick Downs [email protected] Faculty Development Grant Number SP12I16
Activity: Attended the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Annual Conference, July 9 – 13, 2012
SIAM is an international organization comprised of over 13,000 individual members who are interested in the application of mathematics to solve problems arising in engineering, science, and industry.
The goals of SIAM are
To further the application of mathematics to industry and science.
To promote basic research in mathematics leading to new methods and techniques useful to industry and science.
To provide media for the exchange of information and ideas between mathematicians and other technical and scientific personnel.
What I learned from the conference
An important message throughout the conference was that in the last ten years, mathematics and computational science have grown in importance in almost every discipline of science,
engineering, and technology. Students with mathematical and computational talent have more career options than students who focus on just an engineering field or an area of science.
Emerging areas that need people with a strong background in mathematics and computational science are:
Bioinformatics or computational biology, Data mining,
Materials Science,
Computer Animation and Digital Imaging, Finance and Economics, and
Ecology, Epidemiology, and Environmental Issues.
Websites that offer information about careers in math are
Careers in Mathematics: www.msri.org/ext/CareersinMathematics.html Sloan Career Cornerstone Series: www.careercornerstone.org/math/math.htm SIAM Job Board: jobs.siam.org
In addition to course work, the following are some suggestions from employers on what students should do to become more marketable.
Project work – It is important that students have the experience of working on team projects beyond their coursework. Working on a team project helps students learn how to work with others, how to meet deadlines, and it gives students the satisfaction of
completing a project.
Communication and Teamwork – Communicating skills go beyond writing and
presenting well. To be an effective communicator on a team, students need broad enough technical skills to understand what other members are saying. The ability to listen to and learn from other team members is just as important as the ability to generate one’s own ideas.
Become proficient in programming - Students need to know that programming is an essential tool in industry. Common languages that are useful to know are C++ or Java, a fourth-generation language such as MATLAB or R, and a high-level scripting language such as Python.
An important job for math educators is to help promote mathematics to students who are not aware of how important math is in industry and society. The following websites offer
information to illustrate the value and importance of mathematics and computational science. SIAM Nuggets: www.siam.org/publicawareness/nuggets.php
In an effort to increase the public’s awareness of mathematics in the real world, some articles from SIAM Journals have been written at a level understandable by the general public.
Math Matters, Apply It!: www.siam.org/careers/matters.php
The website has a series of downloadable one-page PDF flyers explaining a variety of applications that require the use of mathematics.
Why Do Math: www.whydomath.org
This website highlights solutions to many important problems in science, society, and daily life in an easy to understand format.
Over the next year I plan on summarizing some of the talks from the conference into shorter versions that can be given in class as examples showing different applications of mathematics. Here are examples of some of the talks from the conference that show the diversity of
applications of mathematics.
Elliptic Curve Cryptography and Applications by Kristin Lauter of Microsoft Research. Systemic Risk by George C. Papanicolaou of Stanford University.
Applying Mathematics to Better Understand the Ocean by Emily Shuckburgh of the British Antarctic Survey.
Liquid Crystals for Mathematicians by John Ball from the University of Oxford. Animations and Images by Robert Bridson of the University of British Columbia.
Geometric Computing by Helmut Pottmann of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia.
At the end of August SIAM and NSF will be hosting a 2 day workshop, Modeling Across the Curriculum – Undergraduate STEM, that will discuss how to put more application problems into the Common Core Curriculum. I will follow up with the organizers of the workshop, Ron Buckmire from the NSF and Peter Turner of Clarkson University to find out the results of the workshop.
A recommendation to other faculty who might attend in the future
Appendix: List of sessions attended
On Monday I attended the following sessions:
On the Shape of Data by Gunnar Carlsson. This talk covered the use of topology to look at data to try to determine patterns in the data.
Elliptic Curve Cryptography and Applications by Kristin Lauter. Elliptic curve
cryptography is an approach to public key cryptography based on the algebraic structure of elliptic fields that requires less computational power to encode and decode messages than the standard RSA method.
Undergraduate Research in Applied and Computational Mathematics.
o Spectral Properties of Neural Network Structures by Jeffrey Moulton looked at the relationship between synaptic strength and how signals propagate through a neural network.
o The Effects of Signal Delay in Gene Regulatory Networks by Sarah Stanley talked about a way to model the transmission of information to obtain a better
understanding of how genes work.
Systemic Risk by George C. Papanicolaou. This talk discussed how large scale
interconnected systems (i.e., power grids and banking systems) are susceptible to failure by seemingly unimportant events.
Take Initiative, Make Contacts, and Collaborate: My Journey form Graduate School to Professor by Rachel Ward.
On Tuesday I attended the following sessions:
Applying Mathematics to Better Understand the Ocean by Emily Shuckburgh of the British Antarctic Survey. This talk illustrated how mathematics is being used to study transport and mixing in the ocean, thus leading to advances in climate modeling. A short video describing the work on a research ship in the Southern Ocean can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQOnjeY_WC0
Image Processing and Computational Mathematics by Tony Chan. The recent introduction of inexpensive cameras in cell phones has increased the importance of looking at the mathematics of taking, storing and manipulating images.
Liquid Crystals for Mathematicians by John Ball. The displays in cameras, cell phones and calculators are all based on liquid crystals which have many unique properties.
On Wednesday I attended the following sessions: Student Presentations
o A half-blood half-pipe, a perfect performance by Rongsha Li. This talk describes the design of a half-pipe snowboard course that will allow a snowboarder to maximize the time they spend in the air.
o Clustering in a Network by Dan Furlong, Dylan Marriner, and Louis Ryan. This talk looked at the number of repeaters needed to transmit radio signals over an area.
o C.A.R.S. Cellular Automation Rafting Simulation buy James Jones, Suraj Kannan and Joshua Mitchell. This project involved developing a model to optimize the scheduling of rafts down a river.
o The Secrets of Leaves by Cheng Fu, Hangqi Zhao, Danting Zhu. This talk looked at a model that can be used to estimated the weight of leaves on a tree.
Publishing and the Opportunities Before Us by Doug Arnold. The cost to libraries for scientific subscriptions is skyrocketing and something needs to be done to make scientific information more readily available.
On Thursday I attended the following sessions:
Freeform Architecture and Discrete Differential Geometry by Helmut Pottmann. The use of freeform architecture (free-standing structures) is increasing and has raised some interesting mathematical research problems.
On Mean Field Games by Pierre-Louis Lions. This talk was about a new class of
mathematical models that can be used to describe the behavior of a very large number of agents (i.e, people, birds, fish, etc.) who decide what to do based on what is happening around them.
SIAM-NSF Workshop on Modeling Across the Curriculum by Ron Buckmire and Peter Turner
Math Modeling as the core of Applied Math Undergraduate Curricula by Jeffrey Humpherys,
Mathematical Modeling in Biological Sciences by Angela Shiflet
Complex Adaptive Systems and the Challenge of Sustainability by Simon Levin. With the increase in human population and the limited number of resources
my experiences and assessment results from a first semester biocalculus course at the University of Portland, where I have tracked both student performance and attitudinal changes towards mathematics over the course of the semester.
A New Quantitative Modeling Course for First-Year Biology Students by Dmitry Kondrashov.
On Friday I attended the following sessions:
Overcoming the Tyranny of Scales in the Subsurface Flow and Reactive Transport Simulation by Timothy Scheibe. This talk describe the problem of trying to model subsurface flows where interactions between particles, chemicals and biological agents take place on different scales.
Complex Networks, A Tour d’Horizon by Ernesto Estrada. This talk gave an introduction to network and the problem of communicability in complex networks.
Undergraduate Research on the Fast Track: From Nothing to Publication in Eight Weeks by Matthias Gobbert
Multidisciplinary Undergraduate Research in Computational Mathematics and Nonlinear Dynamics of Biological, Bio-inspired and Engineering Systems by P. Seshaiyer
Models for Undergraduate Research, Best Practices, and Questions by Jennifer Pearl. Building An Applied and Computational Math Degree Program from the Ground Up by
