This award provides partial support for approximately twelve U.S. mathematicians to participate in a workshop on the topic of Inverse Problems to be held in Sodankyla, Finland, from June 14 to 20, 1992. The workshop is jointly organized principally by Professor John Sylvester of the University of Washington and Professor Lassie Paivarinta of the Mathematics Department of the University of Helsinki. Research in this area of applied mathematics is growing in Finland, and the government and private foundations in Finland are providing the major support for the meeting and publishing the proceedings. Rapid advances in the field offer opportunities for research and applications that did not exist just a few years ago. The workshop will focus on three areas of multidimensional inverse problems where the recent interchange of ideas has been particularly fruitful, and where increased international interaction should provide significant acceleration in progress. These topics are inverse scattering, impedance tomography, and multidimensional inverse spectral problems. Expected participants include some of the outstanding contributors in these fields. The subject of inverse problems includes the mathematical foundations of scientific problems in diverse areas of practical interest from seismology to radar. New methods have been developed in the past five years that have stimulated rapid progress in multidimensional inverse problems of many kinds. The workshop will serve as a means for disseminating information and encouraging collaboration among researchers in different areas of this crossdisciplinary field. It is specifically designed to enhance the training of postdoctoral and graduate students, as well as the more senior participants, from Finland, the Soviet Union, Europe and the U.S. The location is a particularly convenient setting for Soviet researchers, who use different methods from their foreign counterparts, to meet American mathematicians and exchange ideas.
