The intend of this proposal is to provide partial support for the U.S. participants of the 6th International Conference on Levy Processes. The support is primarily aimed at graduate students, postdocs, junior faculty, women and minorities. The conference is scheduled to be held on July 26-30, 2010 at the Technical University of Dresden, Germany. It follows a companion summer school in Braunschweig, July 22-24, 2010.
Levy processes are at the crossroad of many different mathematical disciplines such as Fourier analysis, potential theory, partial differential equations, fractal analysis, and various branches of stochastics. At the same time, Levy processes are now being used in a great variety of scientific and engineering problems, and as a result, a host of new mathematical problems have arisen. Essential use of the theory of Levy processes occur in disparate fields such as mathematical finance, insurance, telecommunications, extreme values theory, quantum theory, meteorology, geophysics, astrophysics, and many other areas.
Conferences on Levy Processes foster cross-fertilization of ideas and help researchers to enter into these ares of vital and often interdisciplinary research. A central theme of this proposal is to help make the conference, as well as its satellite summer school, accessible to junior researchers and graduate students in the United States.
This project provided partial support for the U.S. participants of the 6th International Conference on Levy Processes held at the Technical University of Dresden, Germany on July 26-30, 2010. It also supported the attendance of U.S. graduate students and junior faculty at a companion Summer School in Braunschweig, July 22-24, 2010. The International Levy Conferences are well attended and successful meetings which foster a scientific exchange of research and ideas among the many researchers in this area. The conferences bring together scientists from various backgrounds in order to encourage the cross-fertilization of ideas and research problems across generational and subject-specific boundaries. Companion summer schools for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars have become a tradition of Levy conferences. They educate and help to attract young researchers to the central scientific problems in this area. NSF funding of this project helped to make the conference accessible to the U.S. participants, as well as its satellite summer school, accessible to junior researchers and graduate students. Levy processes are mathematical models of a chaotic, discontinuous and purely random walk in space. They serve as the foundation to model physical systems whose time evolution is subjected to a combination of two types of random noise, pulse and diffusive. The presence of such noise in physical systems was observed a long time ago in science, starting with the 1918 Schottky landmark paper reporting results of experiments with vacuum tubes. Nowadays, applications of Levy processes occur in disparate fields such as mathematical finance, insurance, telecommunications, extreme values theory, quantum theory, meteorology, geophysics, astrophysics, and many other areas. The United States' strong presence in the current development of research and education in this area of mathematics is paramount because of its wide range of applications to science, economics, and engineering. This project positively contributed to this aim.
