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The theme of the current academic year at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications, in Minneapolis, USA, is Probability and Statistics in Complex Systems ( www.ima.umn.edu/complex/ ).
The program addresses systems with a very large number of interacting parts in which the interactions are non-linear, in the sense that the behaviour of the system cannot be predicted simply by understanding the behaviour of the component parts. The mathematical and statistical foundations of this program include stochastic modelling and simulation and analysis of massive data sets, as well as dynamical systems, network and graph theory, optimisation, control, design of computer and physical experiments, and statistical visualisation.
The fall quarter has been devoted to genomics.
The winter quarter will be devoted to communications networks and related models for power systems. The problems associated with designing, engineering, and managing such rapidly evolving systems have shaped much of networking research in the past and are likely to play an even more important role in the future as the scale of the problems addressed extend well beyond what has previously been considered.
The winter program will begin with a short course on “The Internet for Mathematicians” (7-9 January 2004). Steven H Strogatz will open the program with a public lecture entitled “Sync: the Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order.” The course is immediately followed by a one-day tutorial “Measurement, Modelling and Analysis of the Internet” (11 January 2004). The winter quarter will include two other workshops: “Robustness in Complex Systems” (9-13 February 2004), and “Control and Pricing in Communication and Power Networks” (8-13 March). Each workshop will be preceded by a one-day tutorial.
The spring quarter is concerned with advanced mathematical, statistical and computational methods in finance and econometrics. It contains three workshops: “Risk Management and Model Specifications Issues in Finance” (12-16 April 2004), “Model Implementation, Algorithms and Software Issues” (3-7 May 2004) and “Financial Data Analysis and Applications” (24-28 May 2004). Moreover, it has one ‘hot topics’ workshop, unrelated to the annual theme, entitled “Compatible Spatial Discretisations for Partial Differential Equations” (11-15 May 2004).
To request an invitation for one of the workshops, tutorials or short courses, point to
www.ima.umn.edu/docs/reg_form1.html.
Questions? Write to staff@ima.umn.edu . We hope to see you here.
— Tom Kurtz