15th International Conference on Approximation Theory

Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN

Investigators

Abstract

The Principal Investigators will organize the "15th International Conference on Approximation Theory", to be held in San Antonio, Texas on May 22-25, 2016. Participants in this conference will present recent advances in approximation theory, a field of mathematics that has had a major impact on science and engineering for well over 100 years and that has enabled concrete technological advances in the United States. For example, the mathematics in this area has had significant impact on computer-aided design and manufacturing (a key tool in the aircraft and automotive industries), animation and computer graphics (major tools in the video gaming and movie industries), data compression and processing (critical to information technology applications, such as HDTV or medical imaging), geophysical problems (such as weather modeling and oil exploration), uncertainty quantification (which plays an important role in environmental and climate modeling as well as nanotechnology), and modeling in the business world. This conference will bring together students, junior researchers, and leaders in the field from around the world, aid young researchers in advancing their careers, and attract PhD students to work in the subject. In addition to providing a forum for the exchange of ideas, the meeting will also help identify trends and areas for future research. More than 80% of the grant funding will be devoted to supporting the participation of students and young researchers, especially women and underrepresented groups. The meeting will engage approximately 150 mathematical scientists from academia, industry, and government laboratories from around the world. It will continue the tradition of triennial meetings in the subject which began in 1973 and which have been the premier comprehensive meetings in the area. The meeting will feature eight one-hour survey lectures on topics of current interest (including quasi-Monte Carlo methods and high-dimensional approximation, compressive sensing, applications of radial basis functions in partial differential equations and finance, multivariate orthogonal polynomials, isogeometric analysis, rational geometric splines, and multivariate polynomial and spline approximation). The Eighth Vasil A. Popov Prize in Approximation Theory will be awarded at the meeting, with the winner giving one of the plenary lectures. The conference will run for four days and include about 130 additional invited and contributed presentations. As with all of the previous meetings, a carefully reviewed and edited conference proceedings is planned. The web site for the conference is http://www.math.vanderbilt.edu/~AT15/