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Latest Posts

Four reasons why the fight against climate change is likely to fail

March 15, 2014

Democrats in the Senate stayed up all night talking about the perils of climate change. But while there's hope that technology, changing consumer and business practices or new policies could finally turn the tide and slow or reverse climate change, there are also good reasons to think those efforts will fail. [...]

How Inge Lehmann discovered the inner core of the Earth

February 19, 2014

Inge Lehmann was a Danish mathematician. She worked at the Danish Geodetic Institute, and she had access to the data recorded at seismic stations around the world. She discovered the inner core of the Earth in 1936, by analyzing the seismic data from large earthquakes recorded at different stations around the world. [...]

Ninth Simons Public Lecture


On November 4, 2013, Emily A. Carter (Princeton) delivered the ninth and final public lecture in the series. The title was Quantum Mechanics and the Future of the Planet and the location was the Korn Convocation Hall at UCLA.

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Workshops

ICERM IdeaLab: Problem Solving Workshop for Early Stage Postdocs

General

Organized by Henry Cohn (Microsoft Research New England), Jeffrey Hoffstein (Brown University), Christopher K.R.T. Jones (University of North Carolina), Pamela Martin (IUPUI), Bjorn Sandstede (Brown University), and Joseph H. Silverman (Brown University)

http://icerm.brown.edu/idealab_2013

07/15/2013 - 07/19/2013

The Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM), Providence, RI United States

ICERM’s Idea-Lab invites 20 postdoctoral researchers to the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM) for a week during the summer of 2013. The program will start with brief participant presentations on their research interests in order to build a common understanding of the breadth and depth of expertise. Throughout the week, two or more leading senior researchers will give comprehensive overviews of their research topics. Organizers will create smaller teams of participants who will discuss, in depth, these research questions, obstacles, and possible solutions. At the end of the week, the teams will prepare presentations on the problems at hand and solution ideas. These will be shared with a broad audience including invited program officers from funding agencies.

Participation: IdeaLab applicants should be at an early stage of their post-PhD career.

Applications for the 2013 IdeaLab will open in January 2013 via MathPrograms.org.  Application materials will be reviewed beginning March 15, 2013.

One of the two topics to be discussed during this program is specific to the MPE2013 initiative: “Tipping Points in Climate Systems”

The climate is changing and it is due to anthropogenic sources of carbon-that is agreed upon by the scientific community. But is there a possibility of abrupt change? On the whole, the large climate models do not predict such occurrences, but they also do not include the physical mechanisms that might trigger these tipping points in the modeling. So, how do we try to predict abrupt transitions? Is it even feasible?

There has been a considerable amount of mathematics devoted to rapid changes, dating back to catastrophe theory, and also to systems that enjoy varying time-scales. This has laid the groundwork for an emerging area of tipping points in climate. But can we account for the potential climate tipping points with what amount to low-dimensional bifurcations? And, if we can, what are ways that this mathematical technology can be factored into the construction of large models?

There have, of course, been abrupt changes in the past, such as rapid warming after ice-ages. Can we learn from these? The technical approach here might be to assimilate the data into models. But the current techniques of data assimilation do not accommodate abrupt transitions. This can be viewed as the same issue arising in modeling: both modeling and data assimilation require relatively smooth evolution. But we must still be able to say something when it is not so smooth.

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