This award provides support for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers participating in the twenty-fifth meeting in the series of Shanks Conferences and Lectures, held 17-20 May 2010 at Vanderbilt University. The conference encourages and financially supports participation by students, recent Ph.D. recipients, and members of groups underrepresented in mathematics.
The conference centers on the structure of interacting systems under various physical constraints, with particular emphasis on systems of particles interacting through a pair-wise potential with motion restricted to the unit sphere of given dimension. The conference focuses on (a) relationships between geometrical, topological, and combinatorial properties of a manifold that are reflected in the asymptotics of minimal energy problems; (b) the analysis and development of statistical mechanical models from first principles; (c) tilings and Voronoi decompositions; (d) high-dimensional sphere packings; (e) the geometry of the structure of jammed and near optimal configurations; and (f) the asymptotics of the zeros of random polynomials.
The meeting features a distinguished lecture by number theorist Noam Elkies, eight invited plenary speakers, special sessions for talks by other participants, and a poster session for graduate student research. The conference highlights significant recent developments and provides a forum for the participants to meet and jointly explore open problems of common interest in an informal atmosphere.
Conference web site: www.math.vanderbilt.edu/~optimal2010/
' held in Nashville, TN and hosted by the Vanderbilt University Department of Mathematics during the period May 17-20, 2010. The general theme of the meeting concerned the analysis and applications of `optimal' point configurations on manifolds with topics including best-packing, spherical codes, minimum energy problems, random packings, and approximation on manifolds. The conference brought together researchers from a variety of disciplines including mathematics, physics, chemistry, and geoscience working on related problems but often using different tools and perspectives. For example, the PIs Hardin and Saff began a collaboration at this conference with G. Wright on applications of minimum energy points to applications in geoscience. The organizing committee of Optimal 2010 consisted of H. Cohn (Microsoft Research), D. P. Hardin (Vanderbilt), E. B. Saff (Vanderbilt), and S. Torquato (Princeton University). The mathematical program consisted of the Shanks lecture delivered by Prof. Elkies, eight one hour plenary lectures and forty-eight (25 minute) invited and contributed talks given in parallel sessions. Especially significant were the opportunities for young researchers to interact with distinguished senior researchers. The plenary lectures were as follows: Christine Bachoc (Universite Bordeaux 1), Distance avoiding sets on the sphere and other manifolds Mark Bowick (Syracuse University), Two-dimensional condensed matter Noam Elkies (Harvard University), Poisson summation and packing problems Abhinav Kumar (MIT), Energy minimization and connections with sphere packing and spherical codes. Charles Radin (University of Texas), The Stability of Optimizers of Energy or Density Ian Sloan (University of New South Wales), Sequences of point sets and scaled RBFs for multiscale approximation on the sphere Neil Sloane (AT&T), From Packing Planes in Four-Space to Quantum Error-Correcting Codes Sal Torquato (Princeton University), From Unusual Ground States to Packing Problems Steve Zelditch (Johns Hopkins), Large deviations for congurations of zeros on Riemann surfaces The plenary talks were videotaped and are available at the website: www.math.vanderbilt.edu/~optimal2010/
