This award continues the partial (but essential) support of NSF for the spring meeting at Maryland of the Semi-annual Workshop in Dynamical Systems and Related Topics, cosponsored since 1992 by the dynamics groups in the mathematics departments of Maryland and Penn State. (The fall meeting is held at Penn State.) The conference covers a broad range of topics in dynamical systems, with a particular (but not exclusive) area of emphasis in most meetings. The goals of this conference are to promote the communication of mathematical results; to facilitate interaction and progress in dynamical systems and related fields; to nurture the sense of community and common mission in these fields; and to contribute to the training of graduate students and recent Ph.D. recipients and to their integration into the dynamics community. In particular, in the middle of the conference there are typically 3 to 8 short talks by graduate students with good results. Over the years the conference has enjoyed the participation of many prominent mathematicians, as well as (we see now) future leaders. History of past programs can be found at the conference website www.math.umd.edu/research/dynamics/conferences .
The field of dynamical systems, roughly speaking, studies the way in which systems change over time: especially, how typical points of a system behave over time, and when properties of interest in a system are stable under perturbation of the system. Because so many mathematical structures can be considered in terms of how they change over time, dynamical systems uses a broad range of mathematical disciplines (including differential equations, functional analysis, geometry, probability theory and many others). Conversely, the dynamical approach has contributed significantly to progress in some of these fields, at a deep and nontrivial level. A recent example -- in number theory! -- is the dynamical influence on the work of Green and Tao which showed that the prime numbers contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. In addition, various practical problems are fruitfully studied from the viewpoint of dynamical systems, including current applications in weather forecasting and the computation of orbits of space "voyagers". In recent years "chaos theory", a part of dynamical systems, has had an impact on scientific practice. Jim Yorke, a member of the Maryland dynamics group, shared the 2003 Japan Prize (with Benoit Mandelbrot) for his contributions in this area. This $400,000 prize is among the world's most prestigious scientific awards.
