Author of the best selling The Golden Ratio, internationally known astrophysicist Mario Livio examines the power of mathematics to explain the both physical universe (cosmology) and human behavior (cognitive sciences) in his latest book Is God a Mathematician? Livio also takes on the question of whether mathematics is a creation of the human mind or a virtual world awaiting discovery, just as astronomers discover previously unknown galaxies. Presented as part of the Seattle Science Lectures, with Pacific Science Center and University Book Store.

http://www.townhallseattle.org

Differential Equations appear naturally in many mathematical biology models since they are the basic language of expression of the different considered mechanisms. Ordinary differential systems, either deterministic or stochastic, form usually the bricks of the modelling from which more complicated phenomena can be analysed by means of Partial differential equations. The qualitative properties obtained from the analytical and numerical study of these models can be a great deal of information for the modeller in order to assess model’s validity and a way of improving the modelling.

This first series of courses of the thematic program wants to explore particular and specific mathematical models in Biology mainly in the areas of adaptive dynamics, cell movement by chemotaxis, pattern formation, tumour growth modelling and population dynamics. The speakers for the advanced course are: Odo Diekmann (University of Utrecht, Netherlands), Masayasu Mimura (Meiji University, Japan), Benoît Perthame (ENS-Paris-6, France), Luigi Preziosi (Politecnico di Torino, Italy) and Angela Stevens (Heidelberg , Germany).

These courses are connected to the European Marie Curie PhD network DEASE "Differential Equations and Applications in Science and Engineering" coordinated by the WPI Wien.

http://www.crm.cat/acmodeling/

The investigation of eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the Laplace operator in a bounded domain or a manifold is a subject with a history of more than two hundred years. This is still a central area in mathematics, physics, engineering, and computer science, and activity has increased dramatically in the past twenty years for several reasons:

• A discovery of many fascinating properties of the Laplacian eigenfunctions such as the localization in small regions of a complicated domain and scarring in quantum chaotic billiards
• The use of Laplacian eigenfunctions as a natural tool for a broad range of data analysis tasks, e.g., dimensionality reduction of high dimensional data via diffusion maps, or analysis of fMRI data for understanding functionality of brain regions
• The use of the underlying Laplacian eigenvalues as natural "fingerprints" to identify geometrical shapes, e.g., copyright protection, database retrieval, quality assessment of digital data representing surfaces and solids, and the related inverse spectral problems
• The spectral analysis of the Laplace operator for a better interpretation of nuclear magnetic resonance measurements of diffusive transport, e.g., experimental determination of the surface to volume ratio in porous media through the asymptotic properties of the heat kernel
• Numerical computation of the Laplacian eigenfunctions and eigenvalues in irregular, often multiscale domains (or sets, or graphs) that still remains a challenging problem demanding for new numerical techniques.

This workshop will be an exciting opportunity to discuss various aspects of these new or long-standing problems with experts in different fields, including mathematics, physics, biology, and computer sciences.

http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/le2009/

Speakers:
Nicholas Andruskiewitsch (Universidad Nacional de Cordoba)
Yuri Bahturin (Memorial University of Newfoundland)
Georgia Benkart (UW - Madison)
Miriam Cohen (Ben Gurion University)
Shlomo Gelaki (Technion - Israel Institute of Technology)
Jane Kashina (DePaul University)
Martin Lorenz (Temple University)
Geoff Mason (UC - Santa Cruz)
Sonia Natale (Universidad Nacional de Cordoba)
Don Passman (UW - Madison)
David Radford (University of Illinois - Chicago)
Hans-Jurgen Schneider (Universität München)
Peter Schauenburg (Universität München)
Lance Small (UC - San Diego)
Efim Zelmanov (UC - San Diego)

http://www.math.ucsd.edu/~jfarina/smconf/

A series of five lectures from speaker Yuval Peres (Microsoft Theory Group, University of California, Berkeley, University of Washington) on the topic of "Internal Aggregation, the Abelian Sandpile and Fair Allocation."

http://math.rice.edu/Calendar/PorterLectures/PorterLecture.html

The format for the west coast version of this meeting is a sequence of 15-20 contributed talks of length 30-45 minutes each. Talks can be on any topic in graph theory, combinatorics or theoretical computer science. The diversity of topics has been a strength of past instances of this conference.

http://www.math.uvic.ca/faculty/gmacgill/CCC2009.html

Speakers:
Tobias Colding (MIT)
John Lott (UC Berkeley)
Neil Trudinger (Australian National Univ.)
Cedric Villani (ENS, Lyon/Princeton)
Jiaping Wang (Univ. of Minnesota)
Guofang Wei (UCSB) 

http://www.math.ucsd.edu/~scgas/

The dynamics of condensed materials is typically characterized by a wide range of time scales. Of particular difficulty id describing rare-event dynamics, which occur, for example in conformation changes of macromolecules, nucleation events during first-order phase transitions, chemical reactions in solution and on surfaces, transport in and on solids, and genetic switches displaying bistable behavior. Quantifying the rates and mechanisms of these rare events is a significant theoretical and computational challenge, especially in systems with high dimensionality. The objective of the workshop is to address these issues, involving perspectives from mathematicians, chemists, physicists, and engineers. 

http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/re2009/