This project is a three-year effort to support participation in the 2010 and 2012 Copper Mountain Conferences on Iterative Methods and the 2011 Copper Mountain Conference on Multigrid Methods. The funding in this award is specifically intended to support the participation of students, women, and minority scientists. The Copper Mountain Conferences have graduate students forming a very large fraction of the attendees (typically 30%-40%), many of them full participants who co-author papers and give presentations. Women and minorities are growing fractions of the attendees (e.g., 27 of 49 students participating in 2008 were women); this award funding is targeted to further enhance their proportions. Support for the students, women, and minority scientists from this award is in the form of reduced registration fees, travel support, and subsidized meals and lodging. The funding also supports a "Student Paper Competition", which draws entries from a significant fraction of the student attendees and results in extraordinarily high-quality papers on scientific discovery from the students, working in tandem with and under the guidance of their faculty advisors. These results, like the conferences as a whole, span wideranging and important theoretical and applications areas, such as techniques of convergence analysis, implementation and development of mathematical software, and use of such ideas in novel settings, including advanced computer architectures and new applications such as uncertainty quantification.
The Copper Mountain Conference series form arguably the premier conferences in two closely related mathematical fields: iterative and multigrid methods. These two fields provide computational support for numerical simulation of a very wide host of endeavors, including environmental and energy research, medical and biological applications, and many other areas critical to the U. S. and international science and engineering community. This award supports the participation of students, women, and minority scientists at those Conferences. The Conferences? traditionally work to ensure the future vitality of the fields of iterative and multigrid methods by facilitating development and nurturing of a community of capable graduate students and entry-level scientists. Through their egalitarian structure, with no invited speakers and all talks of equal length, the Conferences provide mechanisms for young people to meet each other and all participants in a relaxed yet scientifically rigorous setting; these mechanisms include topical tutorials, themed evening workshops, and access to the broad representation of participants from academia, national laboratories, and industry. The Conferences have a tradition of a very high level of student participation (typically 30-40% of attendees), and will cultivate this through supporting students' local and travel expenses. An emphasis is placed on engendering diversity through support of women and minority scientists. These conferences bring together the world?s leading practitioners in these critical fields and result in high-level publications, effective applications codes, and the establishment of longterm collaborative research partnerships.
Outcomes Report on 2011-2013 Copper Mountain Conferences on Multigrid and Iterative Methods Principal Investigator: VAN EMDEN HENSON Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Front Range Scientific, Inc. This report describes the outcomes and impact of NSF support for the Fifteenth Copper Mountain Conference on Multigrid Methods, March 27-April 1, 2011; the Twelfth Copper Mountain Conference on Iterative Methods, March 25-30, 2012; and the Sixteenth Copper Mountain Conference on Multigrid Methods, March 17-22, 2013. The success of this series is measured not only by its continuing popularity among practitioners over the past 30 years, but also by the tangible scientific contributions that have resulted. For example, three major scientific journals have devoted a total of fourteen Special Issues to papers documenting transactions of the conference series. The series has also fostered numerous scientific collaborations via both planned and chance encounters occurring at the conferences. These collaborations have led to many publications, and have contributed substantially to the dramatic expansion of multigrid and iterative methods both as research fields and as tools used in an ever-widening array of important applications. An important theme of the Copper Mountain Conferences is to engage and connect the mathematical sciences community and to continue to increase the number of its participants. The conference series is notable in its emphasis on participation by students, who typically account for 35-45% of the attendees. Most importantly, these students are strongly encouraged to participate fully in the meetings. Many present papers. They are encouraged to do so by an annual student paper competition; additionally, the conference offers tutorials that are designed to introduce newcomers to the methods in these ever-expanding fields. For many years, participants who first attended these conferences as students have been asked to stand up at the conference banquet, and it is not unusual to see more than half of the audience on their feet. In recent years, faculty members bringing students have also been recognized; indeed, the conference banquet recently began noting faculty members whose students have become faculty members and have themselves brought students to the conference – and so on, to where the conferences are now seeing up to fourth generation students! Furthermore, the conferences have made an effort to attract participation by foreign scientists, women, and other underrepresented groups. The most notable successes, to date, can be estimated by examining the percentages of foreign students in attendance, often approaching half the total number of students. These signature characteristics of the conference series, of outreach and inclusion, show how well aligned the series is with NSF objectives and how significant its impact is on the sciences community. The Conference organizers have always striven to increase breadth and diversity of the participants by encouraging attendance by students, women, post docs, junior faculty, and minority mathematicians. It is also important to note that the Copper Mountain Multigrid Methods conference series is the only regularly scheduled international meeting on multigrid methods held in the western hemisphere, and the most frequently held of all international multigrid conferences. The Copper Mountain Iterative Methods conference Series is the only regularly scheduled international conference devoted to iterative methods.
