Bill Sears Colloquia - Spring 2006

The Bill Sears Club is an informal series of talks intended to give CAM students an idea of the research interests of various CAM-affiliated faculty. First and second year students are especially encouraged to attend. If you are interested in giving a presentation, please contact Jeffrey Pang (cp229cornell.edu)

All Bill Sears colloquia take place on Tuesdays in 657 Rhodes Hall, with pizza served beforehand.

• Monday, March 13 - 1:30-2:00, Gennady Samorodnitsky, ORIE, Cornell

• Friday, February 17 - 1:30-2:00, Alexander Vladimirsky, Math Dept. Cornell.
  Imposing the order(ing) for fun and profit."

  The topics visited will likely include:
  * when can one efficiently solve a large system of non-linear equations?
  * why are stationary problems "harder" than time-dependent ones?
  * what's the connection between controlled random processes on graphs
  * and discretizations of PDEs?
  * what are advantages and disadvantages of Eulerian vs. Lagrangian computational frameworks?
  * degenerate & weak ellipticity -- does averaging kill all hope of defining the direction of information flow?
  
  The examples (& pretty pictures illustrating them) will be selected from
  * optimal control problems;
  * differential games;
  * anisotropic front propagation;
  * invariant manifolds of vector fields;
  * multivalued (non-classical) solutions of PDEs.