The principal investigator (PI) and Co-PIs organize the 2012 John H. Barrett Memorial Lectures in the University of Tennessee at Knoxville from May 9-11, 2012 (www.math.utk.edu/~xfeng/barrett/). The Barrett Lectures have been held annually since 1972. Each year a different topic is chosen, representing the research interests of the mathematics faculty of the University of Tennessee. Since 1993, the lectures have consisted of three one-hour survey talks by each of two or three leading researchers representing different themes and directions in a single field. The topic of the 2012 Barrett Lectures is: ``Recent Developments in Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element Methods for Partial Differential Equations". The main speakers of the 2012 Barrett Lectures are Franco Brezzi of University of Pavia(Italy) and Chi-Wang Shu of Brown University. Each of them will deliver three one-hour survey lectures on recent developments in discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods with respective emphases on interior penalty and local discontinuous Galerkin methods. In addition to the main speakers, ten speakers are also invited to give one-hour talks on topics related to one of the main lectures and on applications of discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods to hyperbolic conservation laws and Hamilton-Jacobi equations, convection-diffusion equations, shallow water equations, porous media flows, elasticity, high frequency wave equations, and materials phase transitions. Moreover, a poster session is also scheduled in the Lectures, giving the opportunity to those who attend the meeting to present their work in these areas.
The Barrett Lectures are partly funded by a grant from the University of Tennessee and have often received additional support from the National Science Foundation. They attract wide interest, with an audience of between 40 and 60 participants from the whole country, in addition to faculty and students from Knoxville and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They represent one of the few long standing lecture series in mathematics in the southeastern United States. The main objective of the 2012 Barrett Lectures is to provide the participants with an exposition of modern discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods for partial differential equations arising from various scientific/engineering/industrial applications, through in-depth survey lectures and informal discussions with the leading researchers in the field. Additional goals are to foster interdisciplinary collaboration, particularly with researchers in the domain sciences departments and in the College of Engineering at the University of Tennessee and several other southeastern institutions, and to generate a set of written surveys in the subject, which the organizing committee will endeavor to have published in book form. The fund being requested from the NSF will be spent providing partial support towards travel and accommodation for thirty graduate students, postdocs, and junior researchers who do not have research grants.
The 2012 Barrett Lectures, which is the 42nd Lectures in the series, were held on the campus of the University of Tennessee at Knoxvillefrom May 9-11, 2012. The topic of the 2012 Barrett Lectures was`` Recent Developments in Discontinuous Galerkin FiniteElement Methods for Partial Differential Equations", which is a hot topic and has a broad appeal to researchersfrom applied sciences and engineering. One of the primary goals of the Barrett Lectures is to bring prominent researchersworking in such active areas to UTK, as a service to the universityand to the southeastern region of the United States. As one of the few long running lecture series in mathematicsin the southeastern United States, plus the popularity andbroad appeal of its topic, it was expected that there wasa large attendance of the Lectures in 2012. About seventy people from the United States and Europeattended the Lectures and about half of the attendees are juniorresearchers (assistant professors, postdocs and graduates students). Twelve invited speakers delivered sixteen one-hour lectures in the conference. They covered abroad aspects, from theories to applications, of discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods. The two main speakers gave six in-depth survey lectures, which are very beneficial to the participating graduate students and postdocs. With help of the NSF support, the PIs were able to provide full financial support for a total of twenty-two graduate students and postdocs who attended the conference. The PIs have been working on the publication of the proceedings of the 2012 Barrett Lectures in the last several months. It has been decided that the proceedings will be publised by Springer as a volume in the book series of the Institute for Mathematics and its Application (IMA). A book contract has been signed with a delevery deadline of May 31, 2013.
