What Happens in "Snowbird" Stays in "Snowbird" (2025 Edition)

I'm off to the 2025 "Snowbird" SIAM dynamical-systems conference. I love this biennial migration to my favorite conference series!

An XKCD Comic about Adjustments for High Altitude

On the heels of my return from the 2019 Snowbird conference late last night (and the fact that, at least for one year, we're finally changing the venue), I am highly amused by the xkcd comic about high altitude.

I especially like the Nena one ("Nuclear war can be triggered with only 94 red balloons") and the Scrabble one ("Scrabble letters are worth 16% more").

Once More, With Feeling: What Happens in Snowbird Stays in Snowbird

I'm heading to my 10th "Snowbird" conference! (I have missed only the 2005 one since my first one in 1999.)
Counting the 2014 MRC, this is my 11th trip to Snowbird.

This is possibly the last one that will actually be in Snowbird. (I'm looking forward to the conference being in Portland in 2021.)

Let's get this party started.

Highlighting Lead Junior Scientists in SIMODS

For the journal SIAM Journal on the Mathematics of Data Science (SIMODS), one of the things I did as a member of the editorial board was to suggest (based on having seen this in the journal Biology Open and really liking the idea) to our Editor-in-Chief (Tammy Kolda) that we could highlight lead junior authors with a Q & A once their articles are published. Tammy supported the idea, so we're doing it; and today the first such profile appeared in SIAM News online.

2017 SIAM Workshop on Network Science (13–14 July)

Along with Michelle Girvan, I am co-organizing the 2017 SIAM Workshop on Network Science.

It will take place in Pittsburgh, PA, USA on 13–14 July 2017, and it is co-located with the SIAM Annual Meeting.

Abstract submissions (due 27 February) are now open, and the deadline for early-career researchers to apply for travel support is 20 January. Invited speakers will be announced shortly.

I hope to see you there!

What Happens in Snowbird Stays in Snowbird (2015 Edition)

I am at Gatwick Airport amidst my journey to the Snowbird Ski Resort in Utah for the 2015 SIAM "Snowbird Meeting" on applied dynamical systems. I'll be giving a minitutorial talk on network dynamics.

SIAM's third annual workshop on network science is co-located with the dynamical systems meeting, although I am not bothering to go to it. (Among other things, I'll be working on my talk.)

What Happens in The Other Place Stays in The Other Place (2015 Edition)

I made it to The Other Place on the train today. Tomorrow, I'll be giving an invited talk as part of the Launch Conference for the University of Cambridge's SIAM Student Chapter.

The Chapter president did a research project with me as an undergrad, so yet again the alums from my research group are demonstrating how awesome they are. It's great to see Cambridge start a SIAM Student Chapter.

What Happens in Cambridge (UK) Stays in Cambridge (UK) [2014 Edition]

I only got back from Caltech yesterday evening, and today I am taking a train to Cambridge for the 2014 SIAM Conference on Nonlinear Waves and Coherent Structures.

I have prepared a very topical slide for my talk. Be prepared. :)

Looking Forward

I will be one of the panelists in the Looking Foward session at the 2011 SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems.

Tune in to see what I will have to say about the future of dynamical systems.

Also, I'm sure that Jim Yorke will get into at least one argument with each of the other panelists.

It's really cool to be one of the major participants in this session at the big dynamical systems conference. You might say that I am looking forward to it...

Moser and Crawford Prizes in Dynamical Systems for 2011

The SIAM Activity Group on Applications of Dynamical Systems has announced the recipients of the Jürgen Moser Lecture prize and J. D. Crawford Prize for 2011.


The Moser Lecture prize is for lifetime achievement in dynamical systems, and the 2011 recipient of this prize is Jim Yorke. This is richly deserved. (Yorke is the one who coined the term "chaos", by the way.)

The Crawford Prize is for recent work in dynamical systems. The winner for 2011 is Eric Vanden-Eijnen. I have heard of him before, but I am essentially unfamiliar with his work, so I can't really make any comments other than to state that he won the prize.

4th Annual Oxford SIAM Student Conference

On February 9th (though not in early celebration of my birthday, as has perhaps been rumored in some circles) will occur Oxford's 4th annual SIAM Student Conference. Oxford's student chapter has been a resounding success, and student chapters are starting to spread elsewhere in the UK. (We had the first one in the UK and one of the first few in Europe.)

The Burgeoning Oxford Student Chapter of SIAM

Oxford's student chapter of SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) apparently has a larger number of members than all but 5 entire countries, and we're not that far behind Japan. Go us! [Based on an approximate calculation, but country #6 has maybe about 60% as many people as we do based on the estimate, so my global conclusion should be accurate.] We are estimated to have 213 members, but that overcounts by a decent bit because of people who have graduated who should be counted as UK members but no longer counted as Oxford members.

We're totally going to take over.

3rd Annual Conference of the Oxford student chapter of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics

We hosted a spiffy conference today.

Here are some pictures that I took. Kit Yates took even more pictures than I did, and I'm sure that they will be posted shortly.

Overview of the 2009 Snowbird Meeting

I just completed my network survey of the meeting and once the data is available, I am curious how much my experience as a 'tree' in this conference coupled with network science methods (which study the 'forest') such as community detection will break some of the theoretical anonymity in the survey. (This will be an interesting test of some of the methods and give some insight into how much network methods alone might be able to do in such contexts. Let's see if I actually end up having the time to take a look at the data once it's ready.)

I'm not really going to write a proper overview here. Rather (and, as usual), I'm just going to give a few thoughts.

1. The Snowbird meeting is still perhaps the best one at following my career trajectory. Not only did I know tons of people at the meeting (well over 100 and possibly over 200) but most parts of my career path since I started Caltech as an undergrad in Fall 1994 were covered. Including me, there were 4 people who were all undergrads at Tech at the same time (3 Lloydies + 1 Mole + 0 Flems) and there was at least two more who was a grad turkey then (including one with whom I took a class). There were also near-misses among the grad turkeys, which is one reason I wrote 'at least' (I'm not sure in all cases). There were a couple of people with whom I went to grad school, though not as many as there used to be at this conference. (Some people have left academia, others have different academic interests then before, and some of them are at small universities and simply don't have the travel money.) There were a ton of fellow postdocs from Georgia Tech, a small number of overlaps from my second tour of duty at Tech, and a few others currently at Oxford. From my pre-faculty era, I have not included any faculty in the above summary. There are quite a few of those at the conference with whom I overlapped as well.

2. Within the dynamical systems community, I might be known as much for my t-shirts and personality as for my science. (Some people have been known to make it a point to find out what shirt I am wearing on a given day.) That said, I did notice the audience in my session increase in number by a reasonably substantial amount when it was my turn to speak. That's kind of nice for the ego, though I do wonder about the audience's tastes. :)

3. Cooking bacon was used as an example of mechanical buckling in one of the plenary talks. Sweet! I celebrated the next morning by eating lots of bacon. (Proper bacon is definitely one of the culinary things I miss when living in England. I also miss really crispy friend chicken, so I got some food from Popeye's at the Dallas airport on the way back.)

4. As usual, there were a ton of current and recent CAMsters at the conference. (Cornell has been quite well-represented in dynamical systems for many years.) I don't think any of them knew that I used to be one of them, but then again several of them went to my talk, so maybe they have heard some whispers on the wind.

5. In another fine Snowbird tradition, I once again got a nosebleed. I have yet to succeed at going to this conference without getting one. Maybe in 2011...

6. Number of people at the conference who I had not previously met who told me they read my blog: 1 (I should check and see how large the readership actually is. Maybe I should start a somewhat more benign---by which I mean rated G---blog about dynamical systems to complement this one?)

7. Number of people at the conference who told me they read my papers: 0 (I know that some of them do, but the point is nobody told me that they do.)

Inaugural Class of SIAM Fellows

The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics has announced its inaugural class of 183 Fellow in its brand new Fellows program. (The American Physical Society has had such a program for a long time, and the American Mathematical Society membership has voted down at least a couple of attempts to institute such a program.) Among this initial group are 3 of my colleagues at Oxford, 1 person (the expected one) currently at Caltech, and a whopping 8 people currently at Cornell. The last list includes two members of my thesis committee. As discussed in the press release, the initial list was chosen using very specific criteria (people who had won certain major awards, etc.), so this class of Fellows was perhaps a little more predictable than perhaps some of the future classes will be.

2nd Annual Oxford University SIAM Student Chapter Conference

The Oxford University SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) Student Chapter had its second annual conference on February 3rd. Despite some hurdles as the date approached---that's an inevitable thing with anything like this---everything went smoothly and it worked our superbly. The one unfortunate thing was that I had forgotten the day of it when I bought my Arlo Guthrie tickets, so I needed to forgo seeing Guthrie live and I didn't know who might want the ticket, so that was a bit of a wasted 20 or so pounds. Se la vie.

You can find out more about it on the link or read about our first annual conference in 2008 in the November 2008 issue of SIAM News.

I highly recommend starting up a student chapter at your own universities. Those of us in the Oxford chapter will of course be happy to tell you the things we did wrong so that you don't repeat our mistakes. :) (We did a few things correctly too.)