This award supports travel for participants in the conference "Frontiers in Nonlinear Waves," held at the University of Arizona on 26-29 March 2010. The conference centers on: 1. Soliton theory and applications 2. Coherent structures and wave collapse 3. Wave and hydrodynamic turbulence, atmosphere and ocean dynamics 4. Pattern formation in materials, fluids, and biology 5. Nonlinear optics, laser physics, and optical communications 6. Waves in random media
The meeting features plenary lectures from twelve leaders in the field, and over thirty invited lectures by other leading researchers. An afternoon session is scheduled for talks by young scientists, and there is an evening poster session for contributed papers.
The conference brings together experts from a variety of fields in which methods of nonlinear wave theory are making important contributions. The meeting will attract a diverse audience, expose junior researchers to state of the art research and to important future challenges, and establish connections between researchers working on singularity formation in different areas of applied mathematics. Results of the meeting will be disseminated via publication and video recording. The conference encourages and supports participation by members of groups under-represented in mathematics, junior researchers, and graduate students without other sources of support.
Conference web site: http://math.arizona.edu/~nrw/FNW_2010/
This project had two outcomes that were successfully achieved. First bring in scientific leaders in the field of nonlinear waves for an international workshop aimed at assessing where the field is and where it is heading. Nonlinear waves are universal objects seen in wide areas of science and technology. Some of the most visible examples are tsunamis in the ocean, optical waves that transmit large data through fiber networks or those that produce intense laser beams. Understanding nonlinear wave dynamics is a challenging both mathematically and computationally because of the many processes involved over a large range of spatial and temporal scales. Historically this has also been an area where distinguished Applied Mathematicians and theoretical physicists have produced outstanding scientific achievements such as the discovery of the soliton. In this respect, the first conference organized under this project, which took place at the University of Arizona brought in some of the best scholars in the discipline, including Dirac Medal winner Prof. Vladimir Zakharov who was also recognized for his 70th birthday. This conference not also reflected on the status of nonlinear waves but on the interdisciplinary element as well. Areas of application presented included plasma formation, ocean waves, nonlinear optics and eddy formation and its role in climate patters. Prof. Alan Newell’s talk gave us a perspective of perhaps the most classical work in this field: wave turbulence. The second and equally important outcome was sponsoring participation of as large contingent of Graduate students as possible. Most significant was that their presence was not passive but they were active participants. In fact they represented the majority of presenters in the follow-up workshop organized under this project held at the University of Arizona in October 2011. Most of the students that presented their research work are currently in the advance stages of their PhD dissertation and two of them: Katie Newhall and Marija Vucelja currently hold prestigious postdoctoral positions at the Courant Institute.
