FoCM 2017 Conference: 600 experts on computational mathematics gather at the UB

Moment of the first conference, by Martin Hairer, professor at the University of Warwick (United Kingdom), awarded with a Fields Medal.
Moment of the first conference, by Martin Hairer, professor at the University of Warwick (United Kingdom), awarded with a Fields Medal.
Research
(11/07/2017)

From July 10 to 19 the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of the UB holds the international conference FoCM 2017, the most important conference worldwide on the theoretical aspects of computational mathematics, has gathered around 600 experts at the University of Barcelona.

Moment of the first conference, by Martin Hairer, professor at the University of Warwick (United Kingdom), awarded with a Fields Medal.
Moment of the first conference, by Martin Hairer, professor at the University of Warwick (United Kingdom), awarded with a Fields Medal.
Research
11/07/2017

From July 10 to 19 the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of the UB holds the international conference FoCM 2017, the most important conference worldwide on the theoretical aspects of computational mathematics, has gathered around 600 experts at the University of Barcelona.

The event, a meeting point between mathematics and contemporary computer studies, is organized by the Society for Foundations of Computational Mathematics (FoCM Society), a non-profit entity which has promoted this conference since 1995. The local organizing committee is formed by members of the University of Barcelona, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Pompeu Fabra University and ICREA. It also has the support of the Institute of Mathematics of the UB (IMUB) and the Center for Mathematical Research (CRM) apart from the institutional support of Barcelona Graduate School of Mathematics (BGSMath).

Over these nine days, eighteen plenary speakers will take part in the meeting, including two awardees of the Fields Medal: Martin Hairer, from the University of Warwick (United Kingdom), and Stephen Smale, from the University of Hong Kong (China) and the University of California-Berkeley (USA).

 

Researchers of the UB awarded with the 2016 Journal of Complexity Best Paper Award

During the event, the 2016 Journal of Complexity Best Paper Award will be given to the project “Energy and discrepancy of rotationally invariant determinantal point processes in high dimensional spheres”, signed by the lecturers Jordi Marzo and Joaquim Ortega Cerdà, from the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Barcelona, and Carlos Beltrán, from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Cantabria.

This award, sponsored by Elsevier, consists of 4.000 dollars and a plaque. It will be awarded on July 18 at 9.45 a.m. in the Paranimph of the Historical Building of the UB.

In the awarded paper, the authors study certain rotationally configurations in point processes distributed in spheres. Among other aspects, they study Riesz energies in these configurations. This energy spreads electrostatic energy (Coulombʼs), in which the points play the role of electrons confined to the sphereʼs surface. Asymptotic estimates of energy (when the amount of charges increases) provide, sometimes, the best known estimations of the minimum energy.

Moreover, on the same day, the Stephen Smale Prize 2017 will be given to Professor Lek-Heng Lim, from the University of Chicago (USA), for his research, which integrates computational science with the complexity theory, data statistical analysis and pure mathematics.