Student representatives of 62 SIAM student chapters met with SIAM officers, board, council, and committee members at the 2014 SIAM Annual Meeting in Chicago to share great ideas including how to: organize a regional conference, involve other departments in their activities, use social media to promote their chapters, and raise money from university and community sources.
Some chapter activities that took place between January and May 2014:
On April 26, the California State University, Fresno chapter hosted Math Field Day, an event aimed at promoting mathematics to middle and high school students. The event drew roughly 600 participants who got to compete in events testing their speed, problem solving, and ability to work in teams. The chapter also participated in Mathematics Engineering Science Achievement on February 22, volunteering to guide middle and high school students from disadvantaged areas in group sessions on robotics, rockets, and catapult and bridge building, among other topics.
Cardiff University’s Second Annual SIAM Chapter Day took place January 17 and brought together more than 60 research students and faculty in mathematics and engineering. The program included invited talks from Endre Süli (U. of Oxford), Andrew Fowler (U. of Limerick), and Chris Pearce (U. of Glasgow), as well as poster presentations from doctoral students at Cardiff and Swansea University. Topics ranged from computational accuracy to mathematical modeling in science and industry to engineering applications.
The Second Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) SIAM Student Chapter Annual Meeting was held on June 7. It featured plenary talks from Zaiwen Wen (Beijing International Center for Mathematical Research) and Xiaoying Dai (CAS) and five contributed talks from students.
University of Colorado Denver chapter hosted the 10th Annual SIAM Front Range Applied Mathematics Conference, which was also sponsored by UC Boulder, UC Colorado Springs, Colorado School of Mines, Colorado State, and University of Wyoming. There were 33 student speakers and a plenary speaker, Stephan Sain from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who delivered an overview of the various mathematical and statistical projects at NCAR.
In addition to participating in Front Range, the Colorado State University chapter visited the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) in Golden, CO, on May 9. Nine students learned about mathematical modeling of turbulent wind flows, supercomputing at NREL, photovoltaic chemistry, building techniques that reduce energy consumption, as well as other research efforts at NREL. The chapter also held a technical workshop series, hosted SIAM visiting speakers Guang Lin and Ken Ho (Pacific Northwest National Lab), hosted a visit from Colorado College’s student chapter, and had a bowling night.
Florida Institute of Technology chapter offered a two week summer math program for local high school students. Seven chapter members and their advisor taught the high schoolers MATLAB basics, as well as theory and modeling applications of topics like mathematical epidemiology and graph theory. The chapter held a biweekly reading group during spring semester and hosted talks on category spaces and mathematical applications to breast cancer detection.
University of Minnesota chapter toured the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute, where they got to see the MSI machine room, and visited their university’s Immersive Driving Simulator, where they learned about building simulator environments that are used for a large range of automotive safety issues, such as alcohol, medications, automated vehicles, and roadway designs.
University of Texas at Arlington chapter hosted interesting talks, on topology, big data in healthcare, and population biology.
In April, the chapter at the University of Pennsylvania organized a MATLAB Boot Camp, a two day event that included about 30 participants from various departments.
Uppsala University chapter visited the research department at Ericsson (a communications company), where they saw the prototype for the next 5G network. They also hosted Mustafa Khammash (ETH Zurich) for a talk about how cows regulate their blood calcium. He demonstrated the cow’s control mechanisms via LEGO robots.