Manchester SIAM Student Chapter

2011-07-27T07:47:00.000-07:00

Second Manchester SIAM Student Chapter Conference

The second Manchester SIAM student chapter conference took place on Friday the 20th of May 2011 in the Alan Turing building. Fifty one people registered for the conference and there were well over this number of attendees comprising of staff and students from the Schools of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Manchester, School of Mathematics at Heriot-Watt University and the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford.

The conference was supported by SIAM, Thales Underwater Systems (with a representative speaker), The Waves Group from the school of mathematics and the Manchester Institute for Mathematical Sciences (MIMS). The chapter was able to fund an external staff speaker - Dr. Andy Wathen (former Secretary and Treasurer of the UKIE section of SIAM) from the Mathematical Institute at Oxford University – and two external student speakers from the Oxford and Edinburgh SIAM student chapters.

The conference started with an opening address from chapter president Andrew Gordon. Prof. David Silvester (a faculty advisor for the chapter and former president of the UKIE section of SIAM) then gave an introduction to the guest speaker Dr. Andy Wathen who spoke about Matrix Iterations, ODEs and Asymptotics. This was followed by a talk by Dr. Emma Nichols from the School of Mathematics on Field experiments in UK wildfires and a talk by Ornella Cominetti from the Mathematical Institute at Oxford University on Clustering through diffusion processes on graphs.

The lunch break featured a poster session with eight participants. Pizza and sandwiches were provided for the attendees.

The first afternoon session began with a talk from Dr. Will Parnell on Smart materials for acoustic and elastic wave filtering, followed by a talk from Tom Shearer on Torsional wave propagation in a pre-stressed annular cylinder. Phil Cotterill finished the session with an overview of Thales - one of the conference sponsors.

A coffee and doughnut break preceded the next session, which consisted of talks by Issa Karambal from Heriot-Watt University on Evans function, Fredholm determinant and the stability of wave, Omid Soltan on Optimal trade execution and Chris Welshman on Mapping a family of invariant submanifolds.

The final talk was delivered by Dr. Andrew Hazel on Two-phase flows in curved tubes. Book prizes for the best student talk and best student poster – judged by Professor Nick Higham, (a faculty advisor for the chapter and SIAM vice president at large) Professor David Silvester and Dr. Andy Wathen - were then announced. The prize for the best student talk (a signed copy of Nick Higham ‘Functions of Matrices’) was won by Tom Shearer and the best poster prize (a copy of ‘Finite Elements and Fast Iterative Solvers’ signed by two of the authors David Silvester and Andy Wathen) was won by Michael Crabb. Many congratulations to the prize winners!

Visit the chapter website for more details on the conference, for additional photos and all other events that the Manchester SIAM student chapter have been involved with.

First Manchester SIAM Student Chapter Conference in Pictures

2010-04-27T04:33:00.000-07:00

The first Manchester SIAM Student Chapter Conference took place Monday 26th April in the Alan Turing Building. A total of 40 people attended the conference comprising staff and students from the School of Mathematics, Computer Science, and School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. Representatives of the Oxford and Edinburgh SIAM Student Chapters Christian Yates and Andrew Thompson also attended and gave talks on their work.

The conference was supported by SIAM, The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) (who also sent representatives, more below), and MIMS - Manchester Institute for Mathematical Sciences, School of Mathematics, University of Manchester.

Photographs by Nick Higham and Lijing Lin.

Faculty Advisor and President of the UKIE SIAM Section, David Silvester, Chairs the AM session

Faculty Advisor and Vice President at Large, Nick Higham
gives an opening address

Bill Lionheart from the School of Mathematics gives a talk on "Seeing with Electricity: The Inverse Conductivity (Electrical Impedance Tomography)

Christian Yates, Vice-President of the Oxford SIAM Student Chapter
talks on cell migration

Houman Dallali (School of Mathematics, Manchester)
talks about Walking robots

Chapter Secretary Lijing Lin and Craig Lucas Senior Technical Consultant from NAG.

A photo of some of the attendees

Representatives from The Numerical Algorithms group
attended, including Mike Dewar, Chief Technical Officer (far left), Craig Lucas (far right) and John Holden, Vice President, Sales (left from Craig).

Andrew Thompson (Edinburgh SIAM Student Chapter)

Chris Munro (President, Manchester SIAM Student Chapter)

and Manchester Chapter Faculty Advisor

David Silvester

Sven Hammarling (NAG, Manchester)
giving a History of Numerical Libraries

Zixu Song (School of Computer Science, Manchester)
Applications of Mathematics in Software

Wuxiang Ge (School of Computer Science, Manchester)
continues on Applications of Mathematics in Software

Andrew Thomspon from the Edinburgh SIAM Student Chapter

Oliver Dorn from the School of Mathematics,
talking about Characterization of Petroleum Reservoirs using Shape-Based Models

Qifeng Liao (School of Mathematics, Manchester)
talks about A Posteriori Error Estimation for Low Order Elements

Maxim Abelenkov (School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Manchester), plenary speaker Sven Hammarling (NAG, Manchester) and Françoise Tisseur (School of Maths, Manchester)

Manchester SIAM Student Chapter Committee
Chapter Committee Chris Munro, Lijing Lin, Maha Al-Ammari, Ruediger Borsdorf

Presentation by Dr Mike Dewar (Chief Technical Officer of NAG) of NAG Prizes to Xiaolu Han (MSc in Mathematical Finance) and Michael Crabb (MSc in Mathematics and Computational Science)

SIAM Student Chapter members
Andrew Thompson (Edinburgh). Chris Munro, Lijing Lin, Maha Al-Ammari and Rüdiger Borsdorf (Manchester) and Christian Yates (Oxford)

Welcome to our blog!

2010-01-15T08:00:00.000-08:00

Welcome to our blog!

The Manchester SIAM Student Chapter was set up in December 2009, and is run by a committee of PhD students at the University of Manchester, with help from our Faculty Advisors Nick Higham and David Silvester.

The committee currently consists of myself Chris Munro (President), Rüdiger Borsdorf (Vice President and Webmaster), Maha Al-Ammari (Treasurer), and Lijing Lin (Secretary).

SIAM is the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, if you are not familiar with them, you can find more information on their website.

A little detail about the purpose of the Chapter is in order, our aims are in accordance with SIAM. The objectives of SIAM, as established in the Certificate of Incorporation, are:
• To further the application of mathematics to industry and science.
• To promote basic research in mathematics leading to new methods and techniques useful to industry and science.
• To provide media for the exchange of information and ideas between mathematicians and other technical and scientific personnel.

Our Chapter however has its own specific purposes which are to:
• Increase interaction between students working in applied mathematics and related disciplines, for example, chemistry, physics and and engineering (within and outside of the School of Mathematics).
• Provide opportunities for participants in chapter activities to develop a wide range of skills, for example communication skills when giving talks, and leadership, and teamwork skills in organizing chapter activities.
• Maintain links with industry.
• Develop and foster links and involvement between current, future and past chapter members and participants in activities, to allow sharing of experiences of working in mathematics, awareness of current work and information related to careers and job opportunities. An example activity might be a mathematics contest in modelling to increase involvement of undergraduates.

Our Webmaster, Rüdiger has been busy working on our website which is very close to being finished. When it is ready, any current students or staff at The University of Manchester will be able to register to join the Chapter via the site. Stay tuned for updates!

The Committee are currently working on organizing a one day meeting of the Chapter to be held in Manchester during the first half of 2010, exact details to be announced.

Finally we have a twitterfeed where you can get updates about news on the Chapter, as well as information about any seminars or activities that we are aware of that may be of interest to people working in industrial and applied maths at the University of Manchester (and possibly elsewhere!).