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K-State Today

October 5, 2011

Wildcats, Jayhawks join forces for seminar on applied mathematics

Submitted by Communications and Marketing

Several leading experts on applied mathematics will be the featured speakers at the 11th annual Prairie Analysis Seminar at Kansas State University.

The conference, which is free and open to the public, starts at 12:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 21, and continues all day Saturday, Oct. 22, in 103 Cardwell Hall. It is sponsored by the mathematics departments at K-State and the University of Kansas. The meeting is supported by a grant by the National Science Foundation and by K-State's Isidore and Hilda Dressler Endowment for the Enrichment of Mathematics.

The seminar will feature two one-hour talks by Andrea Bertozzi, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Bertozzi is the director of the applied mathematics program at UCLA, and has received much attention for her work that has applications to such diverse topics as understanding urban crime distribution, cleaning oil up spills and robotics. Giving one-hour talks will be Thomas Laurent of the University of California, Riverside, and Dejan Slepcev of Carnegie Mellon University, both professors.

The talks of the three main speakers will focus on equations and mathematical models related to aggregation. These ideas explore how small-scale interactions lead to large-scale behavior, and are useful in studying population dynamics in biology.

In addition, about 20 shorter talks will be given by mathematicians from throughout the U.S. and Canada. Expected attendance is around 40-50 people.

Conference organizers Marianne Korten and Charles Moore, professors of mathematics at K-State, and Estela Gavosto and Rodolfo Torres, mathematics professors at KU, received a $48,985 grant from the National Science Foundation for the seminar series from 2009 through 2011. The conference alternates annually between K-State and KU.

For more information on the seminar, call 785-532-0567 or visit the website at http://www.math.ksu.edu/pas/2011/.