Midwestern Conference on Partial Differential Equations, Dynamical Systems, and Applications

University Of Missouri-Columbia, Columbia MO

Investigators

Abstract

This award will provide support for participants, especially graduate students, junior researchers, women and mathematicians from under-represented groups in the sciences, to attend the second regional conference "KUMUNU Conference on PDE, Dynamical Systems and Applications" to be held in Columbia, Missouri on April 27-28th, 2019. The meeting is organized jointly by the Departments of Mathematics at the University of Missouri-Columbia, the University of Kansas in Lawrence, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The conference will showcase recent advances and facilitate exchange of ideas in partial differential equations and dynamics of complex systems. Many basic first principles in nature take the form of conservation (or balance) laws for quantities that vary in space and time, and these laws lead naturally to partial differential equations (PDE). PDE are therefore encountered in nearly all areas of science; they describe wave motion, diffusion, deformation, mixing, pattern formation, and many other phenomena. Specific applications of current interest include climate modeling, water waves, electrodynamics phenomena in complex media, and neuroscience. While participants are clustered in the Midwestern and Southern states near Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska, many researchers working at institutions elsewhere in the US will be included. Early career mathematicians will be given an opportunity to present their work to gain recognition and invaluable feedback. For the first time this year, KUMUNU will also feature a mini-course consisting of a series of three lectures to be given by Bjorn Sandstede (Brown). The conference website is http://faculty.missouri.edu/~walshsa/kumunu2019/ Many of the complex nonlinear problems governed by PDE can be reframed as dynamical systems posed on infinite-dimensional spaces. This strategy has proved to be effective, and it certainly shows tremendous promise as a means to attack a host of open problems in nonlinear science. To realize this promise, a strong and continuing collaboration between the PDE and dynamics communities is essential. The goals of the KUMUNU Conference are to support and facilitate this collaboration. The major themes of this year's meeting are as follows: applications of dynamical system techniques to fluid mechanics and water waves; dynamics of dispersive PDE; and spatio-temporal structures. Each of these topics has generated a great deal of recent activity. The KUMUNU Conference will help to advance these efforts, particularly at regional institutions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.