This award supports travel for participants in the summer school program "Conservation Laws and Applications," held at the University of Wyoming on June 22 through July 2, 2010. This summer school, part of an annual program organized and sponsored by the Rocky Mountain Mathematics Consortium (RMMC), focuses on recent developments in the understanding of conservation laws. The program begins with a tutorial on the subject, followed by lectures to introduce the participants to current research. The program is designed to balance the mathematical, computational, and modeling aspects of conservation laws, and it aims to expose participants, especially graduate students, to current areas of active research in the field.
Conservation Laws (or balance laws) are systems of partial differential equations that arise naturally as models for a variety of physical phenomena, including fluid dynamics, magneto-hydrodynamics, combustion, oil recovery, and nonlinear elasticity. The focus of this summer program is on recent developments in the understanding of such equations. Beginning with a rapid tutorial phase, the program will expose participants to current areas of active research and help prepare them to pursue open problems in the field. The program will touch on both theoretical and computational aspects of conservation laws, and application areas (old and new) in which conservation laws play a central role will be highlighted. Participation of members of groups underrepresented in mathematics is encouraged and supported.
Summer school web site: http://math.uwyo.edu/rmmc/2010/
This project supported a two-week summer school for graduate students in mathematics. The main activity was a series of lectures by world-renowned mathematicians. The mathematical content of the lectures was focused on an important class of partial differential equations known as "conservation laws." Despite heroic efforts over many years by a number of very talented mathematicians, the mathematical theory of conservation laws is still very much incomplete, and one of the aims of the summer school was to create an opportunity for students to interact with experts in the field. The lectures covered the principal aspects of both the basic mathematical theory associated with these equations and the practicalities of computing solutions to them (essential for engineering and other applications). In addition, special lectures highlighted some of the cutting-edge developments in the field. In addition to funds from the National Science Foundation, the summer school was jointly supported by the Rocky Mountain Mathematics Consortium, the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications, and the University of Wyoming College of Arts & Sciences. In all, approximately 50 graduate students and faculty in mathematics from a variety of institutions participated in at least some of the activities associated with the summer school. In addition, eight visiting undergraduate students from UW's parallel running Research Experiences for Undergraduates program also participated in the program; they were given special opportunities to interact with the lecturers. The principal impact of this project was on the mathematical development of the graduate and undergraduate students who participated in the program.
