The SIAM Activity Group on Dynamical Systems (SIAG/DS) held its biennial meeting (DS13) at the Snowbird Ski and Summer Resort in Snowbird, Utah, May 19-23, 2013. The meeting was attended by more than 800 participants from academia, industry, and the national laboratories. The program featured nine invited lectures, 136 minisymposia, 191 contributed papers, and 88 posters.
Many events at DS13 related to MPE2013. I especially liked the invited lecture by Paul Johnson (Los Alamos National Laboratory), who illustrated the crucial role of granular materials in the triggering of slip processes in the Earth’s crust. Other invited lectures of interest were given by Adrian Constantin (Imperial College London) on particle trajectories beneath irrotational traveling water waves and Jean-Luc Thiffeault (U Wisconsin, Madison) on the topology of fluid mixing.
A new feature of the program was a daily set of four “Featured Minisymposia.” These minisymposia had been selected by the conference organizers because they might attract a broader audience than regular minisymposia. The organizer of a Featured Minisymposium was asked to give an introduction to the topic area in the first talk, and each of the speakers had five more minutes for their presentation (20+5 minutes, as opposed to 15+5 minutes in a regular minisymposium). As chair of the SIAG/DS I had the privilege of organizing a Featured Minisymposium on “Dynamics of Planet Earth” (MS38), described in an earlier blog posted on May 15. The other Featured Minisymposium which I particularly enjoyed was “Dynamics of Marine Ecosystems” (MS97), organized by Drew LaMar and Leah Shaw (College of William and Mary). Two Minisymposia were of special interest to the climate research community: “Hierarchical Modeling of Sea Ice” (MS36), organized by Renate Wackerbauer (University of Alaska, Fairbanks), and “Data Assimilation: Ensemble, Lagrangian, and Parameter Estimation” (MS109), organized by Tom Bellsky (Arizona State University, Ed Lorenz Postdoc with the Mathematics and Climate Research Network). For those of us interested in issues of climate and sustainability, there were many noteworthy contributions in regular minisymposia, contributed paper sessions and the poster session. I mention the talks by Esther Widiashi (ASU) and Anna Berry (U MInnesota) on non-smooth energy balance models, Karna Gowda (Northwestern U) on Turing patterns for semi-arid ecosystems, and the posters by Adam Mallen (Marquette U) on assimilation of Lagrangian ocean data and Eric Siero (Leiden U) on vegetation patterns under slowly varying conditions. [With apologies to all the presenters not listed here.]
Details of the conference program can be found here.
The invited lectures and some of the minisymposia have been recorded and will be posted on-line at SIAM Presents.
The next SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems will be held at Snowbird, May 17-21, 2015.