A Welcome to MexSIAM
November 13, 2001Barbara Lee Keyfitz
The idea of forming a Mexican section of SIAM was born several years ago, when SIAM past president Gil Strang was lecturing at the ENOAN Summer School. Last year, the section---MexSIAM---was chartered, and its officers---Humberto Madrid, president; Pablo Barrera, vice-president; David Romero, secretary; and Zeferino Parada, treasurer---are planning an ambitious schedule of activities.
A first activity, which the section plans to continue, was to help organize the SIAM-SMM Session for the 34th Congreso Nacional de la Sociedad Matem�tica Mexicana. This year's congress was held in Toluca, a large city in the central highland west of Mexico City, October 7-12. The meeting draws about 2000 people: teachers, students, and much of the mathematical research community of Mexico. SIAM has been co-organizing a session for several years; last year and this, I was one of the organizers, with Pablo Padilla of UNAM, and this year we were joined by Humberto Madrid.
The format of the session is a familiar one for SIAM members: three half-day sessions of talks, typically a mixture of hour-long research/expository lectures, general-interest talks, and shorter, more specialized technical presentations. The speakers represent a mixture of U.S. and Mexican universities; the language of the talks alternates (sometimes quite spontaneously) between English and Spanish.
In the last two years, because of Padilla's and my interests, there was a strong emphasis on partial differential equations. This year, because of travel uncertainties, some of the U.S. speakers were forced to cancel their visits and I was the only U.S. speaker in our session.
The speakers in this year's session were Maria del Carmen Jorge (IIMAS-UNAM), "Conservation laws and the Benjamin-Ono equation"; Antonmaria Minzoni (IIMAS-UNAM), "Modelos en relatividad general y mecanica de fluidos"; Barbara Lee Keyfitz (University of Houston), "Modeling complex flows: Loss of hyperbolicity and singular shocks"; Jose Luis Martines (IMATE Cuernavaca, UNAM), "Ajuste con minimos cuadrados penalizados" (Penalized least-squares fitting); and Eduardo Lopez (IIMAS-UNAM), "Homogenizacion asintotica aplicada a hueso" (Asymptotic homogenization applied to bone tissue).
One idea for future meetings is to invite a U.S. speaker to deliver a general-interest talk (with a "simultaneous translation," if necessary).
At a brief meeting with some of the officers of MexSIAM following the final talk, I learned of several planned activities, which will be reported in upcoming issues of SIAM News. Meanwhile, having been impressed by the liveliness, youth, and talent of the MexSIAM members I met, I look forward to working with the section in the future.
Barbara Keyfitz, SIAM's vice president for programs, is a professor of mathematics at the University of Houston.
