Spring Conferences and Workshops

06-22-2015

This spring the department was host to many conferences and workshops.

6th Symposium on Analysis and PDEs

The 6th Symposium on Analysis and PDEsjust concluded on June 4, 2015 with a successful attendance of over 70 participants. The vast majority of participants were graduate students and postdocs -- and approximately 30% were women!

The Symposium, sixth in its series, focused on recent developments of partial differential equations, geometric measure theory, and applied analysis. It consisted of two minicourses aimed at graduate students and recent PhD's, in conjunction with several one-hour talks on topics closely related to the minicourses. David Jerison (MIT) and Fang-Hua Lin (Courant Institute) were the two principal lecturers who spoke, respectively, on "Free Boundaries and Minimal Surfaces" and "Extremum Problems for Elliptic Eigenvalues." In addition, there were contributed talks for junior researchers to present their results.

The goal of the Symposium is to help junior mathematicians to establish professional connections with key figures in their areas of interest, provide a platform to summarize the most recent progress in related topics, and formulate and develop new problems and avenues of research. Organizers: Donatella Danielli, Arshak Petrosyan, and Aaron Yip.

2015 Great Plains Operator Theory Symposium (GPOTS)

The 2015 Great Plains Operator Theory Symposium (GPOTS) was held from May 26 through May 30 at Purdue University West Lafayette, IN. It was sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Mathematics, Purdue University.

GPOTS is the largest and the most high-profile conference in the field of operator algebras and operator theory. It is an annual event with a thirty-four-year history.

This year, over 100 were in attendance, including a significant number of international participants. The majority of the participants were graduate students and postdocs.

There were 19 plenary lectures delivered by researchers whose work exemplifies and links to the most important recent developments and emerging directions of the field.

In addition, there were about 45 contributed talks which represented an opportunity for junior researchers to present their results. The conference was designed to support the integration of graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and junior faculty into the profession.

The organizers, Marius Dadarlat and Andrew Toms, want to acknowledge the generous effort of the staff of the Department of Mathematics, whose assistance was crucial for the success of the conference. Special thanks to Mrs. Julie Morris.

Conference in Stochastic Analysis and Related Topics

On May 20-22, a conference in "Stochastic Analysis and Related Topics" was held at Purdue in honor of Professor Rodrigo Bañuelos' 60th birthday. The impact of Professor Bañuelos' career in his 29 years at Purdue was evidenced by the excellent list of speakers at the conference and the over 100 people who attended the conference. Talks in the conference covered a broad array of research in probability theory such as stochastic PDEs, spin glasses, percolation, random walks, diffusions on manifolds, and connections of probability theory with problems in analysis and geometry. Generous support from the NSF, IMA, and the college of Science allowed for 49 graduate students, postdocs, and other young mathematicians to receive some funding to attend the conference.

L-functions and the Arthur-Selberg trace formula workshop

A workshop on L-functions and the Arthur-Selberg trace formula was organized by William Casselman (University of British Columbia, Canada) and Freydoon Shahidi (Purdue) over the period May 11-13, 2015, at Purdue's West Lafayette campus. Roughly speaking, the goal of this research is to use methods of geometry and analysis to prove results in number theory. This was a state-of-the-art meeting with talks from 12 leading number theorists and a focus on progress in "Beyond Endoscopy", a new approach suggested by Robert Langlands of Princeton's Institute of Advanced Study, and on a new approach to a general theory of automorphic L-functions pursued by Bao Chau Ngo of the University of Chicago and others. Among the speakers were James Arthur (2015 Wolf Prize winner), the top expert on the trace formula and one of the leaders in automorphic forms, and Bao Chau Ngo (2010 Fields Medalist).