This project helps support U.S. participants in the 2008 Rocky Mountain Mathematics Consortium Summer School. The school educates graduate students and junior faculty on the recent developments in computational methods for partial differential equations. This topic is of major importance in applied mathematics and is key in developing a better understanding of, and prediction capability for, complex physical systems. Topics to be covered at the intensive two-week summer school include: numerical methods for time-dependent problems, nodal Discontinuous Galerkin Methods (theory and implementation), high-accuracy and spectral element methods on structured and unstructured meshes, introduction to parallel computing and high-performance computing on present-day architectures, and various applications such as fluid flow and weather prediction. The lecturers include Jan Hesthaven (Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University, and Director of the Center for Computation and Visualization), Amik St-Cyr (National Center for Atmospheric Research), Henry Tufo (Colorado University-Boulder and National Center for Atmospheric Research), and Tim Warburton (Rice University).
The school has an impact on the U.S. maintaining its leadership role in computational science, by equipping U.S. graduate students with an understanding of the latest computational methods, preparing students to be able to perform parallel computations on developing architectures, and enhancing their understanding of the important role that mathematical modeling and simulations plays in science. The summer school is held just prior to the thematic year-long program on Computational Geosciences at NCAR, and thus prepares graduate students and junior faculty to participate more beneficially in this program. This project also has a large impact on math and science education in Wyoming, as some of the speakers and participants are guest lecturers at the local workshop "Thinking and Doing Math and Science with Engineering," a program that presents Wyoming K-12 math and science teachers with feasible ways to make mathematics and science more pertinent and exciting to their students.
