Annual Report 2005 - Fields Institute - University of Toronto

Joint Institute Initiatives
Support for certain activities of various societies in the
mathematical sciences is provided jointly by the Fields
Institute, the Centre de recherches mathématiques, the
Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences, and in some
cases by MITACS.
Workshop on Computational Biology in the Post Genomics
Era – a collaborative workshop between universities,
NRC and industry
March 19–20, 2005
Held at CRM in Montreal
Steering Committee:
Isabelle Blain (Vice-President, NSERC)
William Cowley (Senior Program Officer, NRC)
Ivar Ekeland (Director, PIMS)
Barbara Lee Keyfitz (Director, Fields)
Francois Lalonde (Director, CRM)
Scientific Committee:
Sandrine Dudoit (UC Berkeley)
Avner Friedman (Ohio)
Michael Hallet (McGill)
Leah Keshet (UBC)
Mark Lewis (Alberta)
Normand Mousseau (Montreal)
John Nash (NRC – IBS)
Enrico Purisima (NRC – BRI)
Jamie Stafford (Toronto)
Ray Somorjai (NRC – IBD)
This meeting was initiated by the three mathematics institutes
– Fields, CRM, and PIMS – and NRC with the idea of
looking for common research topics. At a deeper level, this
is part of an initiative to explore ways that collaborations
between mathematical scientists, including computational
scientists, and biologists, including biomedical researchers,
can be developed. The workshop was hosted by CRM,
and included four sessions on quantitative topics in biology
(biomedical data analysis, computational structural
biology, proteomics and protein modeling, and genomic
analysis). There were three plenary discussion sessions that
focused on the challenges of getting funding for interdisciplinary
research, of the place of interdisciplinary activity
in universities, and of communication difficulties between
mathematicians and biologists. Follow-up activities are
planned for the coming year.
G e n e r a l S c i e n t i f i c A c t i v i t i e s
This meeting was supported by Fields, CRM, PIMS, NRC,
NSERC, and the Canadian Biotechnology Strategy.
First Joint Canada-France Meeting of the Mathematical
Sciences
July 12–15, 2004
Held in Toulouse
Scientific Director: Francis Clarke (Lyon)
The first Canada-France congress involved the three
Canadian societies; CMS, CAIMS, SSC and their French
counterparts: SMF, SMAI and SFdS. Four hundred and
thirty delegates registered with a significant number of students
and postdocs. Several lectures were given in French.
The Institutes funded student travel.
The plenary lectures were given by Laurent Lafforgue
(IHES), Grégoire Allaire (École Polytechnique) , Maïtine
Bergounioux (Orléans), Jonathan Borwein (Dalhousie),
David Brillinger (Berkeley), Walter Craig (McMaster),
Henri Darmon (McGill), Emmanuel Giroux (ENS-Lyon),
Gabor Lugosi (Barcelona), Mikhail Lyubich (Toronto),
Christophe Reutenauer (UQAM), Alain-Sol Sznitman
(ETH Zürich), Murad Taqqu (Boston) and Henry
Wolkowicz (Waterloo). Michèle Artigue (Jussieu) gave the
education lecture.
There were 15 special sessions: Operator algebras, Symplectic
topology and geometry, Partial Differential Equations,
Dynamical Systems, Number theory, Differential Equations
and Control, Variational Analysis and Optimization,
Stochastic Analysis, Multifractals and Long Memory
Processes, The Probability/Statistics Interface, Statistical
Analysis of Functional Data, Numerical Analysis, Low
dimensional Topology and Geometrical Group Theory,
Mathematical Biology, Complex Dynamical Systems.
Moreover there was a poster session for students and
postdocs. Eric Muller (Brock) organized a panel on the
popularization of mathematics.
Discussions are under way for a second Canada-France
meeting in the summer of 2008 in Montreal.
Fields Institute 2005 ANNUAL REPORT 98