Group photo of the participants in the lobby of Boston University’s Photonics Building, the location of the conference. Gene is in the front row second from the right.
Clarence Eugene Wayne (Boston University) turned 60 on June 5th this year and, as is natural on such occasions, a mathematical celebration commenced. This conference, supported by Boston University and the NSF, was organized by Margaret Beck (Boston University), Doug Wright (Drexel University) and Thierry Gallay (Universite Grenoble). It was a tour de force of Gene’s mathematical interests in dynamics systems and PDEs as well as a showcase of where his collaborates and students have ventured. All told there were 61 registered participants, 19 speakers and an evening poster session with 13 posters presenters. This made for a gentle cadence of a single speaker at a time and with lots of time for chatting over coffee and, for many of us, time to start new projects with old friends.
Day 1: Just before the Jean-Pierre Eckmann kicked off the conference as the first speaker.
The talks were in a 1hr format and covered a variety of topics. There was new developments in KAM theory including interesting talks by Rafael de la Llave and Livia Corsi. The analysis of water waves and more generally traveling waves was well represented in the presentations including a challenging talk on the validity/non-validity of amplitude equations for water waves by Guido Schneider. Perhaps my favorite talk was the leveraging of KAM theory to understand the dynamics of near-parallel vortex filaments by Walter Craig.
Gene with his very happy students surrounding him. From left to right: Kresmir Josic (U. of Houston), Lee Devillee (U.I. Urbana-Champaign), Gene Wayne, Margaret Beck (Boston University), Doug Wright (Drexel University), and David Uminsky (U. of San Francisco).
All in all it was great conference for learning and a great gathering of both old and new friends with the same motivation: to celebrate Gene Wayne’s outstanding mathematical accomplishments and thank him for being an outstanding colleague, teacher and advisor. As one of his Ph.D. students, it was bittersweet when the last talk was over. Spending 3 days back home at BU was a reminder for me of how lucky I was to have Gene as an advisor in graduate school, and to see how everyone else in the room who worked with him felt the same way. Happy Birthday Gene!