Some Highlights from the 2016 SIAM Annual Meeting

By Mason A. Porter
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The 2016 SIAM Annual Meeting took place in Boston on 11–15 July. Held jointly with the SIAM Conference on the Life Sciences and co-located with the SIAM Workshop on Network Science, the Annual Meeting was replete was exciting plenary talks, minitutorials, prizes and prize lectures, and a diverse variety of minisymposia and other events. Meeting themes included big data and data science, reproducibility and ethics, dynamic networks, epidemiology, and machine learning and statistics. In advance of the meeting, SIAM News online posted a short article listing 10 things that people shouldn't miss at the meeting.

There were a lot of exciting talks at this year's SIAM Annual Meeting, and here are a few that we'd like to highlight:

  • Donald Knuth of Stanford University gave the von Neumann Lecture in recognition of his "transformative contributions to mathematics and computer science". In his lecture, Knuth discussed satisfiability and combinatorics, and you can read more about his talk in Nick Higham's article for SIAM News.
  • Tadashi Tokieda of University of Cambridge talked about toy problems (pun intended) in the I. E. Block Community Lecture. Tokieda finds delight by exploring (sometimes hidden) depths in everyday phenomena. 
  • Lisa Fauci of Tulane University won the AWM–SIAM Kovalesky Lecture prize, given annually to highlight significant contributions of a woman to applied and/or computational mathematics. In her lecture, which concerned modeling biofluidic mechanics of reproduction, Fauci discussed the use of computational fluid dynamics and fluid–structure interactions for studying sperm motility in the human reproductive system, the mechanics of cilia and flagella, and the dynamics of embryo transfer.

The many exciting plenary talks included one by Vittoria Colizza (who works at Inserm in Paris) on mathematical modeling of disease dynamics on networks (e.g., for studying MERS), one by Bryan Grenfell (Princeton University) on disease dynamics and vaccine predictability, one by Matthew Salganik (Princeton University) on how social science is changing in the era of big data, and one by Tanya Berger-Wolf (University of Illinois, Chicago) on animal dynamics and behavioral ecology.

There were also numerous other (and diverse) fascinating talks and minisymposia with connections to dynamical systems. For example, there were noteworthy talks on mathematical modeling of pulsating soft coralsmathematical modeling in the pharmaceutical industry, mathematical modeling of diabetic kidney disease, modeling the sleep–wake cycle, computational modeling of tissue-engineered heart valves, applying territorial dynamics to territorial gang behaviors, swarm robotics, public opinion polling through Twitter, and many other topics. 

Given the excitement of the 2016 SIAM Annual Meeting, we hope to see all of you next year in Pittsburgh for the 2017 Annual Meeting.

 

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