SC doctoral student Ashley Gannon attended the Women In Numerical Methods for PDEs and their Applications workshop at the Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery (BIRS), this summer. The workshop was a two-fold effort: first, the gathering celebrated the accomplishments of women in numerical PDEs. The event organizers, Nilima Nigam (Simon Fraser University), Marsha Berger (Courant Institute, NYU), Mary-Catherine Kropinski (Simon Fraser University) and Anna-Karin Tornberg (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), used the event to feature a portion of the many notable achievements of women in the field. Second, the workshop served as an opportunity to encourage the participation of young female researchers in the field, and as a professional networking opportunity for women.

Gannon learned of the workshop while attending the SIAM Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) conference in February. “I thought it would be a great opportunity to meet more people in this field and familiarize myself with their work,” Gannon said.

Numerical analysis of partial differential equations and their applications is a vast and vibrant area of scholarly inquiry, with deep connections to many fields of mathematics and computation, and numerous foundational contributions by women. Computer simulations of models described by partial differential equations inform much of the technological progress in our lives, from how cars are designed to how animation in movies are created.

The Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery (BIRS) is a collaborative Canada-US-Mexico venture that provides an environment for creative interaction as well as the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and methods within the Mathematical Sciences, with related disciplines and with industry. The research station is located at The Banff Centre in Alberta and is supported by Canada's Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), Alberta's Advanced Education and Technology, and Mexico's Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT).

You can find a schedule of talks from the Women in Numerical Methods for PDEs and their Applications workshop by clicking on this link; video links are available here.

For more on BIRS, go to www.birs.ca.
For more on the department, go to www.sc.fsu.edu.