This is a preliminary announcement of the MSRI Summer Graduate Programs and request for nominations. The two programs this summer will be:
Mathematical Graphics
July 14-25, 2003 at Reed College in Portland, Oregon
Organizers: Bill Casselman and David Austin
Triangulations of Point Sets: Applications, Structures, Algorithms
July 21-31, 2003 at MSRI
Organizers: Jesús A. De Loera, Jörg Rambau, and Francisco Santos
Brief descriptions of the programs are appended below, and further information is available at
http://zeta.msri.org/calendar/index.html?tab=programs
Please share this information with your department or graduate chair as appropriate. Your institution may nominate two students to participate (and a third if at least one is from an underrepresented group).
We would appreciate having the students' names by *March 31st*.
Also, we enroll students as nominations come in and it is conceivable than one of the programs could fill up before the deadline. If a program does fill up, and you nominate a student for that program, then we will notify you promptly so that you can nominate someone for the other program if you wish.
You may send your nominations by email to sgp@msri.org
Please provide the following information about your nominees: name, email address, and program for which they are being nominated.
We will support students' airfares (up to specific limits depending on departure city) to attend the program, and will be paying for their accommodations (mostly in dorms). In addition we will provide a per diem allowance for meals. We will send this information, along with other pertinent details, to the students once they are enrolled.
Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have questions.
Best regards,
Bob Megginson --
Robert E. Megginson, Deputy Director 510-643-6467
Mathematical Sciences Research Institute 510-642-8609 FAX
17 Gauss Way, #5070 http://www.msri.org
Berkeley CA 94720-5070
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**** Summer Graduate Program in Mathematical Graphics ****
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The basic aims of this program are to teach practical techniques in
producing illustrations of mathematics to accompany research papers and
expository writing, as well as the mathematics underlying these
techniques. Recent experience indicates that bringing out the real point
in mathematical exposition through images is not straightforward; at many
points in this process a number of basic computer algorithms for things
such as sorting and searching must be integrated into the graphics; and,
for the best style, some of the more interesting algorithms, such as those
concerned with convex hulls, Voronoi partitions, and the hidden surface
problem for non-convex bodies, play a role. Illustrating mathematics, as
compared with more casual illustration, is a complicated and specialized
subject. This summer graduate program will provide graduate students with
a hands-on excursion into this topic.
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**** Summer Graduate Program in Triangulations of Point Sets ****
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One of the most useful techniques in Discrete and Computational Geometry
is to decompose a region of space (usually a polyhedron) into simplices,
that is to say, to triangulate it. When the set of points allowed as
vertices is fixed in advance, we say we are triangulating a point
configuration, or a point set. On the side of applications, triangulating
a geometric domain which we intend to study (whatever its dimension) is a
standard procedure for computing its volume, integrating or solving
differential equations, interpolation, surface reconstruction from a
discrete sampling, fixed-point calculations, and so forth. Simplicial or
triangulated objects are classical in topology, and they have been revived
as fundamental techniques in current research due in good part to the
availability of tools for effective, concrete computations. In algebraic
geometry, the so-called toric varieties and part of elimination theory can
be reformulated in terms of polytopes and polyhedra, and there is a quite
exact dictionary between algebraic properties of the varieties and
properties of special triangulations. The goal of this summer graduate
program is to introduce graduate students to this area and its rich
connections to other areas of mathematics.