By Joan Remski
The Great Lakes section of SIAM (GLSIAM) held its annual spring meeting at the University of Michigan-Dearborn on Saturday, April 30. Fifty-two participants from Michigan, Ohio, and Northern Indiana attended this one-day meeting. The keynote speakers were Victoria Booth (Department of Mathematics and Department of Anesthesiology, University of Michigan), Mark Iwen (Department of Mathematics and the Department of ECE, Michigan State University), Fadil Santosa (University of Minnesota, current director of the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications), and Gang George Yin (Department of Mathematics, Wayne State University).
Based on recent studies identifying neuronal populations that control the sleep-wake cycle, Booth’s presentation focused on mathematical models that investigate the sleep-wake regulatory network. She showed that the dynamics of these new models can be reduced to a slowly-modulated hysteresis loop. Santosa discussed a medical imaging process called magneto-acoustic tomography with magnetic induction. He presented the science behind the method, an analysis of the partial differential equations that model the system, and the results of computational experiments. Additionally, Iwen gave an engaging talk on sparse Fourier transforms and compressive sensing, while Yin presented interesting results in systems that contain uncertainty and involve interactions between continuous and discrete events.
In addition to the invited talks, there were twenty-one contributed presentations on topics including stochastic differential equations, numerical analysis, and mathematical biology. The conference also included a poster session. Approximately twenty students participated in the meeting, with three receiving travel support.
Ed Moylan, retired from Ford Motor Company and former GLSIAM officer, attended the conference and spoke highly of it. “Since its formation in 1988, the Great Lakes Section has focused on being a forum for information exchange among mathematicians, engineers, scientists, and students,” he said. “The 2016 Conference continued that tradition. The hallway conversations were lively and the presentations were stimulating, contextual, and diverse, as were the attendees.”
This annual conference is generously supported by SIAM. Next year’s conference will be held at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan.
2016 GLSIAM spring conference attendees on the campus of the University of
Michigan-Deaborn.
Joan Remski is an associate professor of mathematics in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and the program director of applied and computational mathematics at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. She currently serves as secretary of the Great Lakes Section of SIAM.