Imagine spending eight-weeks on the beautiful Brown University campus in historic Providence, RI, working in a small team setting to solve mathematical research problems developed by faculty experts in their fields.

Imagine creating career-building connections between peers, near peers (graduate students and postdocs), and academic professionals.

Imagine spending your summer in a fun, memorable, and intellectually stimulating environment.

Now, imagine having this experience with support for travel within the U.S., room and board paid, plus a $3,000 stipend*.

The 2015 Summer@ICERM Program is designed for a select group of 14-16 undergraduate scholars. Students work in groups of two or three, supervised by faculty advisors and aided by teaching assistants. The faculty... (more)

This workshop focuses on topics at the interface of classical mechanics, differential geometry, and computer experiments. The directions of current research to be explored at the workshop include the study of invariants and complete integrability of geometrically motivated differential equations (in particular, vehicle motion, tire track geometry, and smoke ring equations), sub-Riemannian geometry, geometric control, nonholonomic systems (such as e.g. bicycle stability and nonholonomic methods in billiard problems), computational methods in mechanics and dynamics (including geometric integrators, biological applications, etc.).

The goal of the workshop is to explore broad applications of the mechanical approach to geometry and geometric one to classical mechanics, to foster interaction between researchers in the above areas, with a view of finding new domains for applications of these fertile ideas.

Symplectic and contact geometry and topology, which provide a natural setting for Hamiltonian dynamics, comprise a broad spectrum of interrelated disciplines in the mainstream of modern mathematics. The past two decades gave rise to several exciting developments in these fields: on one hand, powerful new mathematical tools and concepts were introduced, solving long-standing problems that were previously unattainable; and on the other hand, challenging and exciting new questions arose for future research. Presently, symplectic and contact geometry have connections with an amazingly wide range of areas in mathematics and physics: differential and algebraic geometry, complex analysis, dynamical systems, low-dimensional topology, quantum mechanics, and string theory.

The research program will address a number of cutting-edge research topics within symplectic and Hamiltonian dynamics, with a special focus on computational and experimental aspects.

Program Structure
Several... (more)

This event is co-sponsored with the Brown University Physics Department.

The conference will promote a broad discussion of current topics in Non-Equilibrium Statistical Mechanics. Talks will focus on theoretical frameworks (or the desire for such) and on specific systems from wide-ranging fields such as astrophysics, atomic physics, biology, chemistry, climate physics, condensed matter, fluid mechanics, geophysics, and high-energy physics. There will be a mix of experimental, computational, and theoretical perspectives.

This is the second in a series of Conferences made possible by a generous bequest from the estate of Tony and Pat Houghton. Tony, who was a theoretical condensed matter physicist, chaired the Brown University Department of Physics from 1992 to 1998.

Lattices are abstractly very simple objects, yet their concrete realizations contain beautifully intricate problems that are stubbornly difficult even in low dimensions. For example, our present day understandings of densest lattice packings and reduction theory are still plagued with large gaps.

In the 1970's and 1980's lattices entered the world of cryptography as tools used to break certain crypto systems, particularly those based on the subset sum problem, and since the 1990's they have become increasingly important in the building of other types of crypto systems (thanks to the difficulty in the underlying mathematics). Their significance has recently been bolstered by average-case complexity bounds and their present resistance to quantum computing attacks.

Currently the theory of lattices is a lively research topic among mathematicians, computer scientists, and experts in cybersecurity. However, to this date, there has been little to no interaction between these communities.... (more)

Since the days of Boltzmann, it has been well accepted that natural phenomena, when described using tools of statistical mechanics, are governed by various "laws of large numbers." For practitioners of the field this usually means that certain empirical means converge to constants when the limit of a large system is taken. However, evidence has been amassed that such laws apply also to geometric features of these systems and, in particular, to many naturally-defined shapes. Earlier examples where such convergence could be proved include certain interacting particle systems, invasion percolation models and spin systems in equilibrium statistical mechanics.

The last decade has seen a true explosion of "limit-shape" results. New tools of combinatorics, random matrices and representation theory have given us new models for which limit shapes can be determined and further studied: dimer models, polymer models, sorting networks, ASEP (asymmetric exclusion processes), sandpile models,... (more)

This workshop will explore emergent phenomena in the context of small clusters, supramolecular self-assembly and the shape of self-assembled structures such as polymer vesicles. The emphasis will be on surprises which arise when common conditions are not satisfied, for instance when the number of components is small, or they are highly non-spherical, or there are several types of components. Interactions vary from hard sphere repulsion to competition between coarse-grained liquid-crystalline ordering competing with shape deformation.

Examples of this behavior are common in materials such as bulk homopolymers (rubber), copolymers, liquid crystals and colloidal aggregates. A basic mathematical setting would be to consider small clusters of hard spheres with isotropic short-range attractions and study the shape of the clusters as a function of the number of components. One known surprise is that highly symmetric structures are suppressed by rotational entropy.

This emphasizes the need... (more)

The densest packing of unit disks in the plane is easily seen to be highly symmetric. This is exploited in statistical mechanics in arguing that as the density parameter is decreased from its optimum most packings at fixed density remain quite orderly ('solid'), changing only gradually until at a specific density they suddenly begin to 'melt' into the disordered ('fluid') packings of low density. This workshop will explore two variants of this fundamental phenomenon. One variant concerns packings of special shapes, such as the Penrose kites and darts of the accompanying figure, whose densest packings are aperiodic tilings. The other concerns complex networks for which the optima are certain extremal graphs. These optimization problems, and especially their associated solid phases and solid/fluid phase transitions, are the subject of the workshop.

In summary, our workshop will explore two optimization problems on which there is active mathematical... (more)

Emergent phenomena are properties of a system of many components which are only evident or even meaningful for the collection as a whole. A typical example is a system of many molecules, whose bulk properties may change from those of a fluid to those of a solid in response to changes in temperature or pressure. The basic mathematical tool for understanding emergent phenomena is the variational principle, most often employed via entropy maximization. The difficulty of analyzing emergent phenomena, however, makes empirical work essential; computations generate conjectures and their results are often our best judge of the truth.

The semester will include three workshops that will concentrate on different aspects of current interest, including unusual settings such as complex networks and quasicrystals, the onset of emergence as small systems grow, and the emergence of structure and shape as limits in probabilistic models. The workshops will (necessarily) bring in researchers in... (more)

The DIMACS Implementation Challenges address questions of determining realistic algorithm performance where worst case analysis is overly pessimistic and probabilistic models are too unrealistic: experimentation can provide guides to realistic algorithm performance where analysis fails.

The 11th Implementation Challenge is dedicated to the study of Steiner Tree problems (broadly defined), bringing together research in both theory and practice. Broadly speaking, the goal of a Steiner Tree problem is to find the cheapest way of connecting a set of objects. In most common variants, these objects are either points in a metric space or a subset of the vertices of a network, and the goal is to find a tree that connects all of them.

The main aim of the challenge is to create a reproducible picture of the state-of-the-art in Steiner Tree problems. Phases 1 and 2 of this challenge - the collection and improvement of testbeds and algorithm development and evaluation - began in June 2013.... (more)