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Mathematics in Nanoscale Science and EngineeringTutorialsSeptember 17 - 20, 2002SpeakersC.K. Lin (UCLA)Speaker Biographical SketchesAchi BrandtAchi Brandt received his Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science. His thesis was on Numerical methods in hydrodynamics and magnetohydrodynamics. After a period as visiting member of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University he became a senior faculty member at the Weizmann Institute in the Department of Applied Mathematics. He has had Visiting Professor appointments at Stanford, IBM-Watson Research Center, Langley Research Center, Virginia, and the Institute for Computational Studies at Colorado State University. He is the recipient on many awards and prizes including the Landau Prize and the Rothschild Prize in Mathematics. In 1993 he was appointed as the Director of the Carl F. Gauss Minerva Center for Scientific Computation at the Weizmann Institute. According to Professor Brandt: “My main goal is solving nature's equations. In most branches of physics, chemistry and engineering, the fundamental laws of the investigated system are well established, stating the relations that always hold between its microscopic parts. Yet, to derive from these laws the macroscopic behavior of the system at given surrounding conditions is usually a formidable computational task, even with modern supercomputers. The inherent inefficiency of existing computational methods is the major bottleneck in many fields of study. It bars scientists from the theoretical derivation of, for example, the mass of the photon and other properties of elementary particles. It defeats attempts to compute the structure and interactions of chemical compounds, needed to understand and design materials, proteins, drugs, etc. This inefficiency also hampers calculations in fluid dynamics, medical imaging, radar analysis, astrophysics, weather prediction, oil prospecting, lubrication theory, acoustics, image processing, and so on. New mathematical methods to eliminate the inefficiency and to drastically reduce the complexity of all these computational tasks are being developed, based on a novel hierarchical approach to the organization of space and time.” James GimzewskiThe Institute of Physics announced its 2001 Awards to 16 individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the development, management, understanding and communication of physics worldwide. The Duddell Medal and Prize was awarded to Dr James K Gimzewski, for his contribution to nanoscale science in the use of scanning probe microscopy for the understanding and development of nanomechanics and tunneling phenomena in atoms and molecules. His name appears in the 2001 edition of the Guinness Book of Records for an unusual discovery, that of the smallest calculator. It is in fact a "simple" abacus, the ten beads of which each have a diameter of less than 1 nanometer (0.000000001 meter). Each of the beads can be moved individually, not with a finger but using the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope. The scientist who did this spectacular piece of work is James Gimzewski. James Gimzewski is one of the best-known scientists in the world of nanoscience. He has received many other awards, including the 1997 Feynman Prize for his experimental research in the field of nanotechnology. He received his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland and did Post doctoral research fellowships at Oregon State University, Oregon, USA and the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He is currently Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Before that, he was a group leader at the IBM research laboratories in Rüschlikon near Zurich for more than 18 years. He was intimately involved in the development of scanning probe microscopy techniques that revolutionized the world of the nanosciences by making it possible to "see" molecules and even atoms. At the website for the PNR 47 – “Functional Supramolecular Materials, a Swiss federal government funded research program is an interview of James Gimzewski conducted by Matthieu Buchs. For the text of this interesting interview, with his comments on nanotechnology, please go to http://www.swiss-science.org/_nfp47/html_e/nfp_frame.htm Vwani RoychowdhuryVwani P. Roychowdhury received the Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1989. From 1991 to 1996, he was a faculty member with the School of electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1995. In 1996, he joined the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is currently a Professor of electrical engineering. He also serves on the faculty of the Biomedical Engineering Interdepartmental Program. Prof. Roychowdhury's research interests include models of computation, quantum and nanoelectronic computation, quantum information processing, fault-tolerant computation, combinatorics and information theory, advanced statistical processing, and adaptive algorithms. He holds the patent for the methods and apparatus for enhancing gray scale. He has co-authored several books including Discrete Neural Computation: A Theoretical Foundation (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1995) and Theoretical Advances in Neural Computation and Learning (Boston, MA: Kluwer, 1994). Prof. Roychowdhury was a General Motors Faculty Fellow at Purdue University from 1992 until 1994 and was awarded the Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Teacher Award in 1994. He received the 1999 Best Paper Award from the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks for his paper, "On Relative Convergence Properties of Principal Component Analysis Algorithms". Dimitri VvedenskyDimitri Vvedensky is Professor and Head of Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics in the Department of Physics at Imperial College. He obtained his B.S. in Mathematics at the University of Maryland in 1974 and his S.M. and Ph.D in Materials Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976 and 1979, respectively. He came to the University of London as a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at University College before joining the faculty of Imperial College in 1985. He was promoted to Reader in 1989 and Professor in 1992. He was an Associate Director of the University of London Interdisciplinary Research Center for Semiconductor Materials during 1990-1998 and a co-director (with Bruce Joyce) of the Japan Research Development Corporation Project on "Atomic Arrangements: Design and Control for New Materials" during 1989-1996. His research interests are in the application of theoretical and computer simulation techniques to model nanostructures, nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, especially of driven lattice systems, and the multiscale modeling of materials phenomena. He has been an invited speaker at over 60 international conferences on all aspects of his work, and is the author of more than 200 technical publications. He has edited several books and written the book Partial Differential Equations with Mathematica (Addison-Wesley, 1993). He was the guest Professor at ETH Zürich in 1998 and the Wilhelm Professor at Würzburg University in 1999. He is a member of the Institute of Physics, the Materials Research Society, the American Physical Society, and Tau Beta Pi. Horng-Tzer YauProfessor Yau received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and has had appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study and Courant Institute. He is the recipient of both Sloan Foundation and Packard Foundation Fellowships. At the 2000 Congress in Mathematical Physics (ICMP) in London he was awarded the Henri Poincaré Prize. In this award he was cited for his successes in deriving the laws of macroscopic physics from a microscopic viewpoint in several areas of physics. In this work he has displayed both an original and a formidable analytic talent. Professor Yau was awarded the Morningside Gold Medal in Mathematics in 2001, given at the Triennial Meeting of the ICCM (2001) to encourage young mathematicians of Chinese descent in the pursuit of mathematical truths. He is on the editorial boards of the Communications in Mathematical Physics, the Journal of Statistical Mathematics and the Asian Journal of Mathematics. Professor Yau currently has an appointment with the Courant institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University in the Department of Mathematics. His areas of interest are probability theory and statistical mechanics. Contact Us:Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) |
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