Last Saturday, at the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) Research Symposium at Santa Clara University, Inez Fung gave a wonderful spirited lecture on “Climate Math.” She described some of the early history of computing and forecasting climate and some of the new challenges in projecting future climate change. She addressed the question of whether recent weather events suggest that the weather has become chaotic and if this is related to climate change with some interesting insights from the Lorenz butterfly attractor.
This talk was a preview of the South African MPE2013 Simons Public Lecture, which will be delivered by Inez Fung on March 26, 2013 in Cape Town.
Interestingly, the third plenary talk at the symposium was given by Lauren Williams and it also had a tie to MPE2013. The title of the talk was “Grassmannians and Shallow Water Waves”. The talk described some interesting connections with the geometry of water waves and combinatorics. When I walked into the recital hall to attend this lecture, I thought the picture on the screen looked familiar. It turns out it was one of those that appears in our blog of February 28 in the article about the work of Mark Ablowitz and Douglas Baldwin.
So the MPE2013 movement is spreading out in many ways.
Estelle Basor