SIAM Annual Meeting 2017 Preview

The I. E. Block Community Lecture on Wednesday evening will be given by Emily Shuckburgh on From Flatland to Our Land: A Mathematician’s Journey through Our Changing Planet. Emily, from the British Antarctic Survey, is a co-author of the recent book Climate Change, which she wrote with HRH Prince Charles and Tony Juniper.

As always, a number of prize lectures will be given at the meeting. These include the four-yearly James H. Wilkinson Prize in Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing, which will be awarded to Lek-Heng Lim. His lecture is titled Tensors in Computational Mathematics. See this article about Lek-Heng.

The meeting is held jointly with the SIAM Conference on Industrial and Applied Geometry (GD17) and the SIAM Conference on Control and Its Applications (CT17), in the same location. One registration fee gains you access to all three meetings!

In addition, the SIAM Workshop on Parameter Space Dimension Reduction (DR17) and the SIAM Workshop on Network Science (NS17) are taking place just before and just after the conference, respectively.

Funding of mathematics, and other subjects, is in a state of uncertainty under the current US administration. In the minisymposium How Changing Implementations of National Priorities Might Affect Mathematical Funding a panel of representatives from funding agencies will describe the current situation and future opportunities. This is a great chance to hear the latest news from Washington from those in the know.

SIAM provides a host of activities for students, beginning with an orientation session on Sunday evening and including a career fair, a session on career opportunities in business, industry and government (BIG), and the chance to meet and talk to invited speakers and co-chairs.

An evening session will include Christine Darden, who was one of the human computers included in the book “Hidden Figures” by Margot Lee Shetterly, on which the recent Hollywood movie of the same title was based.

The Business Meeting (Tuesday at 6.15pm) provides an opportunity to hear the president (that’s me!) and SIAM staff report on SIAM’s activities over the past year and to ask questions. The 2017 SIAM Fellows will be recognized, and a reception in their honor follows the Business meeting.

SIAM is developing a new website. A preliminary version will be available on laptops in the exhibit hall for participants to try. Feedback will be much appreciated and SIAM staff will be on hand to receive your comments.

If you are staying in Pittsburgh on the Friday night, consider attending a baseball match. The Pittsburgh Pirates play the St Louis Cardinals at home at PNC Park on Friday July 14. I went to the Friday match after SIAM AN10 and really enjoyed it; the views from the ground are spectacular.

If you are not able to attend you can get a feel for what’s going on by following the hashtag #SIAMAN17 on Twitter.

There’s plenty to do and see in Pittsburgh, as the following images illustrate. As well as the impressive bridges over the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, and some interesting downtown architecture and murals, there’s the Andy Warhol Museum (a short walk from the convention center). Here are some images I took in 2010.