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In January, 2011, AIM will bring together mathematicians, graduate students, and industry and public agency representatives to work on a variety of sustainability problems, including renewable energy, air quality, water management, and other environmental issues. Additional participants are sought for this workshop. For more details, and an online application form, please see the announcement page.
Proposals are sought for focused workshops and SQuaREs to be held at AIM in Palo Alto. Please see the workshop proposal guide or the SQuaREs page for details and an online application form. The deadline for applications is November 1.
The American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) has been awarded a grant from the Tellabs Foundation to support a workshop for middle school math teachers. The teachers will join the AIM Math Teachers' Circle, which connects teachers with mathematicians to work on mathematical problem solving.
Mathematicians from North America, Europe, Australia, and South America
have resolved the first one trillion cases of an
ancient mathematics problem. The advance was made possible by a
clever technique for multiplying large numbers.
The numbers involved are so enormous that
if their digits were written out
by hand they would stretch to the moon and back.
The biggest challenge was that these
numbers
could not even fit into the main memory of the available computers,
so the researchers had to
make extensive use of the computers' hard drives.
The seven NSF Mathematical Sciences Research Institutes announce the creation of 45 new two-year positions for young, highly-trained mathematical scientists across the country. In addition to furthering research in all areas of the mathematical sciences, these positions will allow recent PhDs to teach at community colleges and other higher-education institutions or to participate in projects tied to business and industry. This new initiative is a result of a partnership among the National Science Foundation-supported mathematics institutes. Read more...
Update, January 26: Soundararajan has proven the original version of the QUE conjecture, completing the missing step in Lindenstrauss' program for noncompact arithmetic surfaces. His paper is available on the ArXiv. October 10, 2008: In a seminar co-organized by Stanford University and the American Institute of Mathematics, Soundararajan announced that he and Roman Holowinsky have proven a significant version of the quantum unique ergodicity (QUE) conjecture. "This is one of the best theorems of the year," said Peter Sarnak, a mathematician from Princeton who along with Zeev Rudnick from the University of Tel Aviv formulated the conjecture fifteen years ago in an effort to understand the connections between classical and quantum physics. "I was aware that Soundararajan and Holowinsky were both attacking QUE using different techniques and was astounded to find that their methods miraculously combined to completely solve the problem," said Sarnak. Both approaches come from number theory, an area of pure mathematics which recently has been found to have surprising connections to physics. The motivation behind the problem is to understand how waves are influenced by the geometry of their enclosure. Imagine sound waves in a concert hall. In a well-designed concert hall you can hear every note from every seat. The sound waves spread out uniformly and evenly. At the opposite extreme are "whispering galleries" where sound concentrates in a small area.
Read more..., including articles by Peter Sarnak and Zeev Rudnick.
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