Handling editor and photographer: Hinke Osinga
Photographers from TU, Dresden: Lutz Liebert, Frank Henschel
Markus Piersig, Martin Däumler
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The 8th AIMS Conference on
Dynamical Systems, Differential
Equations and Applications
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Dresden University of Technology
Dresden, Germany, May 25–28, 2010 |
A few years ago the East German region of
Saxony-Anhalt was running a promotional campaign, advertising itself
as the "Land of the early birds." I am not sure if this resulted in
crowds of tourists packing out the country's hotels and B&Bs in
the hope for a very early morning call, but the slogan stuck. And it
immediately came to my mind, when I saw the programme of the
8th AIMS
Conference on Dynamical Systems, Differential Equations and
Applications in Dresden (in Saxony, neighbours with
Saxony-Anhalt): with the plenary lectures starting at 8.15 in
the morning, you had to get up early if you wanted to get the most out
of the conference (or at least hear those plenary lectures).
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AIMS Director Shouchuan Hu at
the opening ceremony. |
Barbara Gentz (Bielefeld) with
Conference Chair Stefan Siegmund
(Dresden). |
Even before I noticed how packed the programme
was, the first surprise was the size of the conference. I had not
heard of AIMS before this meeting, so I certainly did not expect to
find 1400 participants at one of their meetings. This is about twice
the number of people compared to SIAM's Dynamical Systems conference
at Snowbird, and it was a great opportunity to catch up with many old
friends and colleagues.
Since the Snowbird
conference is a popular and big meeting dealing with dynamical
systems, how does the AIMS conference compare?
For both meetings, the scheduling is very similar,
with plenary lectures and blocks of parallel sessions. There were 71
Special Sessions and 10 Contributed Sessions in Dresden, with topics
ranging from the very foundations of the theory (Topological Dynamics,
Operator Semigroups) to computational methods and applications in
Physics or Biology (Magnetohydrodynamics, Mathematical Cancer
Modelling), hardly any aspect of dynamical systems theory was left
untouched.
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Claudia Wulff
(Surrey). |
Topic-wise, my impression was that there were
relatively more "pure" sessions in Dresden. (I even heard rumours of
talks being given on the blackboard.) There was also a difference in
the areas of applications being addressed. Whereas mathematical
biology has become a big topic at the SIAM meeting, sessions in the
AIMS conference mainly discussed "classical" applications in physics,
fluid dynamics, control theory, etc. In any case, with usually 35
sessions running in parallel there was more than enough to choose from
and planning the day's talks could take a while.
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Marty Golubitsky (MBI,
Ohio) and Yulij Ilyashenko
(Moscow/Cornell). |
Apart from talks, there was a poster session, but
unfortunately it went almost unnoticed.
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The social programme
was more successful. At least that's what I heard from others. (Being
a fairly regular visitor to Dresden, I did not take part in any of the
tours myself.) What I can confirm is that the conference dinner in the
Westin Bellevue was excellent. It was impressive how the catering
staff managed to feed hundreds of hungry mathematicians in hardly any
time. And who can possibly dislike a buffet of Saxonian delicacies
incl. the finest cake of them all, the Dresdner Eierschecke?
Nobody, of course. Especially, if the dinner comes with a pleasant
lack of long speeches.
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The conference banquet at
Westin Bellevue |
It is clearly a challenge to organise a meeting of
such a size and I can only take my hat off to the organisers and their
many helpers, for how smoothly things went. Chaired by Stefan
Siegmund, they did a fantastic job.
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The next AIMS meeting will take
place in July 2012 in Orlando.
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Thomas Wagenknecht
University of Leeds
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