The second Manchester SIAM student chapter conference took place on Friday the 20th of May 2011 in the Alan Turing building. Fifty one people registered for the conference and there were well over this number of attendees comprising of staff and students from the Schools of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Manchester, School of Mathematics at Heriot-Watt University and the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford.
The conference was supported by SIAM, Thales Underwater Systems (with a representative speaker), The Waves Group from the school of mathematics and the Manchester Institute for Mathematical Sciences (MIMS). The chapter was able to fund an external staff speaker - Dr. Andy Wathen (former Secretary and Treasurer of the UKIE section of SIAM) from the Mathematical Institute at Oxford University – and two external student speakers from the Oxford and Edinburgh SIAM student chapters.
The conference started with an opening address from chapter president Andrew Gordon. Prof. David Silvester (a faculty advisor for the chapter and former president of the UKIE section of SIAM) then gave an introduction to the guest speaker Dr. Andy Wathen who spoke about Matrix Iterations, ODEs and Asymptotics. This was followed by a talk by Dr. Emma Nichols from the School of Mathematics on Field experiments in UK wildfires and a talk by Ornella Cominetti from the Mathematical Institute at Oxford University on Clustering through diffusion processes on graphs.
The lunch break featured a poster session with eight participants. Pizza and sandwiches were provided for the attendees.
The first afternoon session began with a talk from Dr. Will Parnell on Smart materials for acoustic and elastic wave filtering, followed by a talk from Tom Shearer on Torsional wave propagation in a pre-stressed annular cylinder. Phil Cotterill finished the session with an overview of Thales - one of the conference sponsors.
A coffee and doughnut break preceded the next session, which consisted of talks by Issa Karambal from Heriot-Watt University on Evans function, Fredholm determinant and the stability of wave, Omid Soltan on Optimal trade execution and Chris Welshman on Mapping a family of invariant submanifolds.
The final talk was delivered by Dr. Andrew Hazel on Two-phase flows in curved tubes. Book prizes for the best student talk and best student poster – judged by Professor Nick Higham, (a faculty advisor for the chapter and SIAM vice president at large) Professor David Silvester and Dr. Andy Wathen - were then announced. The prize for the best student talk (a signed copy of Nick Higham ‘Functions of Matrices’) was won by Tom Shearer and the best poster prize (a copy of ‘Finite Elements and Fast Iterative Solvers’ signed by two of the authors David Silvester and Andy Wathen) was won by Michael Crabb. Many congratulations to the prize winners!
Visit the chapter website for more details on the conference, for additional photos and all other events that the Manchester SIAM student chapter have been involved with.
