Distinguished Alumni Lectures

The IAM Distinguished Alumni Lectures (DAL) series was initiated in the 2008/09 academic year, with its inaugural lecture by John Stockie. The purpose of this special seminar series is to acknowledge the professional achievements of the IAM alumni and to give the current graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty an opportunity to meet and interact with former IAM students. The DAL talks take place at least once a year on Mondays at 3-4 pm in the usual IAM seminar room (LSK 301), unless noted otherwise.

Fourth Lecture, 27 Feb 2012 – Marc Mangel Of Flour Beetles and Wikipedians I will begin with a summary of the principles that have guided my work over the last 30+ years. Then I will explain a classic problem in population biology: the competition between species of flour beetles that had both determinate (always the same) and indeterminate (probabilistic) outcomes, according to the initial sizes of the competing species. I will describe a number of methods that were used to solve the problem, including one that Don Ludwig and I developed during my PhD studies, and extension of those methods to other problems in biology. I will then turn to the Wikipedia, describe the dynamics of the editors of the Wikipedia, and show that the methods used to characterize the outcome of competition between flour beetles can also be used to characterize the success or failure of a Wikipedia based on its early patterns. The latter work suggests various kinds of levels that can make Wikipedias more or less likely to succeed. Marc Mangel holds BS (Physics) and MS (Biophysics) degrees from the University of Illinois and a PhD (Applied Mathematics and Statistics) degree from the University of British Columbia. After three years at the Center for Naval Analyses, he joined the University of California at Davis. From 1980 to 1996, he served as Assistant, Associate and Full Professor – for eight years in the Department of Mathematics and eight years in the Department of Zoology (Section of Evolution and Ecology). He chaired the Department of Mathematics (1984-1989) and was founding Director of the Center for Population Biology (1989-1993). Currently Marc is Distinguished Professor of Applied Mathematics and Statistics and Director of the Center for Stock Assessment Research at the University of California Santa Cruz, where he has served since 1996. At Santa Cruz, he directed the Geographic Information Systems Laboratory (1996-1999), served as Associate Vice Chancellor, Planning and Programs (1997-1999), and chaired the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics (2007-09). Since July 2010, he has also chaired the Program in Technology and Information Management.

Third Lecture, 20 Sep 2010 – Hart Katz Confessions of a Mathematical Enterpreneur The term "applied" in Applied Mathematics describes more a state of mind than a set of tools. Any branch of mathematics that helps the entrepreneur reach the technical and financial bottom line becomes a branch of applied mathematics. And which branch gets called into the fray depends on the entrepreneur's state of mind. We will share some stories of how applied mathematics has saved the day and made some money. You'll be pleasantly surprised to learn that functions of a complex variable – yes, even the Weiner Hopf method – play a key role in diverse areas from communication engineering to cardiac arrhythmias, to name but a few. You will never look at a PDE the same way again. After a background in physics and medicine, Hart finally found his calling with a PhD in Applied Mathematics in 1974 at UBC. After a few years of employment at Bell Northern Research, NRC and Ontario Hydro – each placement calling for different mathematical tools – Hart found a partner and started his own medical device company. This first company produced a system to help physicians track and treat cardiac arrhythmias. The company was sold to a major health care supplier and since then, Hart has built and sold several health care companies.

Second Lecture, 28 Sep 2009 – Doug James Enabling Reduced-Order Dynamics for Graphics, Haptics and Sound Reduced-order dynamics methods hold promise for approximating the behavior of complex N-dimensional discrete systems, such as deformable objects, in parsimonious, low r-dimensional subspaces (r << N). Ideally, this model reduction can be exploited to provide a principled speed-accuracy trade-off, e.g., for interactive PDE applications. Unfortunately, numerous complications arise in practice: the lack of fast N-independent subspace integration algorithms; kinematic and material nonlinearities; high subspace rank; and the "chicken and egg" problem of determining the subspace before you determine the solution. This talk will describe our ongoing work on leveraging reduced-order dynamics for novel applications in computer animation, haptic force-feedback rendering, and physically based sound rendering. Doug L. James is a tenured professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. He holds three degrees in applied mathematics, including a PhD from the University of British Columbia in 2001 under the guidance of Dinesh Pai. In 2002 he joined the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University as an Assistant Professor, then in 2006 he became an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. His research interests are computer graphics, physically based animation, reduced-order physics models, and multi-sensory physics applications such as sound rendering and haptic force-feedback rendering. Doug is a National Science Foundation CAREER awardee, and a fellow of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

First Lecture, 06 Apr 2009 – John Stockie Porous Immersed Boundaries Porous, deformable membranes are encountered in a wide range of applications, including red blood cells, vesicles, porous wave makers, and parachutes. The "immersed boundary method" has already proven to be a versatile and robust approach for simulating the interaction of impermeable, elastic structures with an incompressible fluid flow. We demonstrate how to extend the method to handle porous boundaries by incorporating an explicit porous slip velocity that is determined by Darcy's law. We derive a simple, radially-symmetric exact solution, which is then used to validate numerical simulations of porous membranes in two dimensions. John Michael Stockie is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Simon Fraser University. He currently also holds a position of BC Regional Scientific Director of MITACS Network of Centres of Excellence and is a member of the Mathematics and Statistics Evaluation Group at NSERC. In 1997 John completed his PhD in the Department of Mathematics and the Institute of Applied Mathematics at UBC under the supervision of Brian Wetton.