Date:

Monday, January 21, 2008,
11:00 am - 12:00 pm.

Place:

CU Building Room 470, UCD Building, 1250 14th St., Denver.

Speaker:

Gil Strang.

Affiliation:

Department of Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Title:

Teaching and Research in Computational Science

Abstract:

The name "Computational Science and Engineering" describes the mixture of mathematics and algorithms that are at the center of modern applied mathematics. I believe that our teaching must go beyond the formula-based courses of the past to a **solution-based** course. I will describe how that course can start (with great matrices that come from calculus -- the talk begins right at our basic courses). In research, medical imaging and other applications use the maximum flow-minimum cut theorem for image segmentation in the plane. This theorem connects to the isoperimetric problem of minimizing perimeter/area. The new constraint is that the set must stay inside a given region (the minimum ratio is the "Cheeger constant"). So the usual winner (the Greeks knew it would be a circle) is no longer best. There are solved and unsolved problems in this mixture of geometry and optimization and duality and applications.

Short Bio:

Gilbert Strang was an undergraduate at MIT and a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. His Ph.D. was from UCLA and since then he has taught at MIT. He has been a Sloan Fellow and a Fairchild Scholar and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Professor of Mathematics at MIT and an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College. Professor Strang has published a monograph with George Fix, "An Analysis of the Finite Element Method", and 7 textbooks:

• Introduction to Linear Algebra (1993,1998,2003)
• Linear Algebra and Its Applications (1976,1980,1988,2005)
• Introduction to Applied Mathematics (1986)
• Calculus (1991)
• Wavelets and Filter Banks, with Truong Nguyen (1996)
• Linear Algebra, Geodesy, and GPS, with Kai Borre (1997)
• Computational Science and Engineering (2007)