Dear colleagues, we have benn sent the following announcement concerning a summer school at the University of Chicago. If you are interested in participation at the event, please contact us.

We are organizing an RTG funded summer school at the University of Chicago between June 16 – July 3, 2015. The school is intended for advanced undergraduates but it is also suitable for beginning graduate students. This three week event will consist of week long minicourseson the following topics

Partial Differential Equations (by P. Souganidis and L. Silvestre)
Solitons and integrable systems (by W. Schlag)
Pseudodifferential operators with applications to linear Schrodinger
equations (by Carlos Kenig)
An Introduction to Fourier Series (by R. Fefferman)
Introduction to percolation and growth models (by A. Auffinger)
Differentiability of functions and measures (by M. Csornyei)
Computing with deterministic and stochastic differential equations (by
Jonathan Weare)

More information and the online application form is available on http://math.uchicago.edu/~chicagoanalysis/

Financial support will be available to some highly qualified applicants. Per NSF regulations RTG funding is restricted to US citizens and permanent residents. Housing will be available in the university dormitories for those participants receiving financial aid. Participants who do receive financial support will be responsible for their own accommodations. For further information, please look at the school’s website mentioned above.

Dear colleagues, please see the attached list of international schools that will be held at the International Centre for Mechanical Sciences, Udine, Italy. If you are a student of mathematical modelling and you are interested in some of the schools, please contact us (Josef Málek, Vít Průša). Mathematical Institute could provide you some funding for participation at the chosen event.

The International Centre for Mechanical Sciences (CISM) Udine, Italy, will organize among others the following Advanced Schools:
 
Bone Cell and Tissue Mechanics
Udine, June 22-26, 2015
Coordinated by
Bert van Rietbergen (Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands).

Information about the contents of this course and the procedure for admission can be found at http://www.cism.it/courses/C1503/.
 
Mechanics of Liquid and Solid Foams
Udine, July 13-17, 2015
Coordinated by
Andrew Kraynik (Sandia National Laboratories, USA and University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany) and Stelios Kyriakides (University of Texas at Austin, USA).

Information about the contents of this course and the procedure for admission can be found at http://www.cism.it/courses/C1506/.
 
Material Parameter Identification and Inverse Problems in Soft Tissue Biomechanics
Udine, October 12-16, 2015
Coordinated by
Stéphane Avril (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines, France) and Sam Evans (Cardiff School of Engineering, UK).

Information about the contents of this course and the procedure for admission can be found at http://www.cism.it/courses/C1511/.
 
We hope that these activities can be of interest.

Thanking you for your kind attention, please refer to our website for detailed and further info.

Professor Bernhard Schrefler
Secretary General of CISM

A list of interesting events in 2015.

Josef Málek and Zdeněk Strakoš have written a book on preconditioning and the conjugate gradient method in the context of solving partial differential equations. The book is about the interplay between modeling, analysis, discretization, matrix computation, and model reduction. The authors link analysis of partial differential equations, functional analysis, and calculus of variations with matrix iterative computation using Krylov subspace methods and address the challenges that arise during formulation of the mathematical model through to efficient numerical solution of the algebraic problem.

The book’s central concept, preconditioning of the conjugate gradient method, is traditionally developed algebraically using the preconditioned finite-dimensional algebraic system. In this text, however, preconditioning is connected to the PDE analysis, and the infinite-dimensional formulation of the conjugate gradient method and its discretization and preconditioning are linked together. This text challenges commonly held views, addresses widespread misunderstandings, and formulates thought-provoking open questions for further research.

Institute of Thermomechanics; Czech Technical University, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering; Université du Sud Toulon Var and Czech Pilot centre ERCOFTAC are organising conference Topical Problems of Fluid Mechanics 2015. The conference will take place on 11th — 13th February 2015 in Institute of Thermomechanics. The aim of the conference is to discuss contemporary problems of fluid mechanics and to bring out latest results obtained in frame of grant projects supported by grant agencies in Czech Republic and abroad. Further details can be found on conference webpage.

Professor Gerhard Wanner (Université de Genève, Switzerland) will give a colloquium lecture on Monday, December 8th at 15:45 in lecture hall K1.

On the discovery of Lagrange multipliers and Lagrange mechanics

The talk explains how

• A thick book on statics (Varignon 1725),
• a letter by Johann Bernoulli to Varignon (1715),
• Euler’s Methodus (1744, on variational calculus),
• and d’Alembert’s Dynamique from 1743,

led to the famous Mécanique analytique (1788, 1811) by Lagrange, in which, in the first part, the advantage of the methods of multipliers is demonstrated at many examples and, in the second part, the equations of Lagrange dynamics are derived from the principle of least action.

In the last part of the talk we show the connection of the ideas of Euler and Lagrange with problems of optimal control (Carathéodory, Pontryagin).

About the speaker

Professor Gerhard Wanner (Université de Genève, Switzerland) is a distinguished expert in numerical analysis and theory of ordinary differential equations. His books such as Hairer, Lubich, Wanner: Geometric numerical integration, Structure-preserving algorithms for ordinary differential equations; Hairer, Wanner: Solving ordinary differential equations II Stiff and differential-algebraic problems and Hairer, Nørsett, Wanner: Solving ordinary differential equations I Nonstiff problems became classics in the given field. He served as President of Section VII of the Swiss Academy of Natural Sciences, Head of Department, and President of the Swiss Mathematical Society.

Colloquium lecture

The colloquium lecture is organized on the occasion on what would have been the 85th birthday of Jindřich Nečas (1929-2002). Jindřich Nečas was an outstanding Czech mathematician who made fundamental contribution to the theory of partial differential equations. His book Les méthodes directes en théorie des équations elliptique published 1967 in French, has become a standard reference for the mathematical theory of linear elliptic equations and systems.

University Center for Mathematical Modeling, Applied Analysis and Computational Mathematics is organizing the regular semester seminar. The seminar will take place on 15th December 2014 in lecture room K2 from 8:30 to 12:10. Seminar schedule is attached. You are all cordially invited to attend the seminar.

Contributed by: Didier Henrion, henrion@laas.fr.

Course on polynomial and LMI optimization with applications in control by Didier Henrion, LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse, France and Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic

http://homepages.laas.fr/henrion/courses/lmi15

Venue and dates

The course is given at the Charles Square campus of the Czech Technical University, in the historical center of Prague (Karlovo Namesti 13, 12135 Praha 2). It consists of six two-hour lectures, given on Monday 16, Thursday 19 and Monday 23 February, 2015, from 10am to noon and from 2pm to 4pm.

Registration

There is no admission fee, students and reseachers from external institutions are particularly welcome, but please send an e-mail to henrion@laas.fr to register.

Target audience

This is a course for graduate students or researchers with some background in linear algebra, convex optimization and linear control systems.

Outline

Many problems of systems control theory boil down to solving polynomial equations, polynomial inequalities or polyomial differential equations. Recent advances in convex optimization and real algebraic geometry can be combined to generate approximate solutions in floating point arithmetic.

In the first part of the course we describe semidefinite programming (SDP) as an extension of linear programming (LP) to the cone of positive semidefinite matrices. We investigate the geometry of spectrahedra, convex sets defined by linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) or affine sections of the SDP cone. We also introduce spectrahedral shadows, or lifted LMIs, obtained by projecting affine sections of the SDP cones. Then we review existing numerical algorithms for solving SDP problems.

In the second part of the course we describe several recent applications of SDP. First, we explain how to solve polynomial optimization problems, where a real multivariate polynomial must be optimized over a (possibly nonconvex) basic semialgebraic set. Second, we extend these techniques to ordinary differential equations (ODEs) with polynomial dynamics, and the problem of trajectory optimization (analysis of stability or performance of solutions of ODEs). Third, we conclude this part with applications to optimal control (design of a trajectory optimal w.r.t. a given functional).

Miroslav Bulíček has been awarded by the Czech mathematical society award. Congratulations!