Volume 45 Issue 06 July/August 2012
Students and Education

Manchester Hosts UK National Student Chapter Conference

Three SIAM student chapters in the UK—at the Universities of Manchester, Oxford, and Reading—joined forces this year to organize the 2012 SIAM National Student Chapter Conference. Held in Manchester, May 18, the conference drew about 80 people; on the program were four invited speakers, 16 student speakers, and seven poster presenters.

Invited speaker Ernesto Estrada of the University of Strathclyde titled his talk “An Invitation to Complex Networks.” The other invited speakers were Will Parnell of Manchester (“Elasto-dynamic Cloaking: How to Make an Invisible Building”), Edvin Deadman of NAG (“A Recursive Blocked Schur Algorithm for Computing the Matrix Square Root”), and Nick Trefethen of Oxford.

Craig Lucas of the Numerical Algorithms Group also presented several NAG-sponsored awards, including the best poster award that went to Ndifreke Udosen of the University of Reading  for “Automated Optimisation of Measurement Locations to Solve Meta Inverse Problems”.

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Manchester local organizers (and SIAM Manchester Student Chapter officers), from left: Samuel Relton, president; Mary Aprahamian, treasurer; and Ramaseshan Kannan, vice president. Photo by Nick Higham.
Françoise Tisseur of Manchester and invited speaker Ernesto Estrada of the University of Strathclyde. Photo by Nick Higham.
Robin Thompson of the University of Cambridge received a best-talk prize for “Modelling the Biological Control of Crop Disease." Photo by Lijing Lin.
Martin Takac (left) of the University of Edinburgh received a best-talk award for “How to Climb a Billion Dimensional Hill Using a Coin and a Compass and Count the Steps Before Departure.” He is shown with Craig Lucas of the Numerical Algorithms Group. Photo by Nick Higham.