2000 SIAM Annual Meeting
September 17, 2000
The recipient of one of SIAM's most distinguished prizes, Persi Diaconis gave this year's John von Neumann Lecture, "Geometry of Markov Chains." Describing himself as a statistician and mathematician, and not strictly part of the applied mathematics community, Diaconis alluded to what many participants seemed to be experiencing: "the sense of community at the meeting."
Richard Tapia (left) and Tony Chan, co-chairs of the organizing committee for the 2000 SIAM Annual Meeting, held in Puerto Rico, July 10-14."We tried to represent the incredibly broad interests of SIAM members," Chan said in his welcoming remarks, citing interactions with other sciences and high-performance computing as two of the meeting's main themes. The organizers had also set out to introduce "a little twist," Tapia said, by inviting first-rate speakers on topics less usual for a SIAM meeting: K-12 education (Uri Treisman) and science policy (Ken Kennedy). Science policy, in a twist Tapia could not have foreseen, dominated many discussions at the meeting, both formal and informal (see SIAM president Gilbert Strang's column).
Diversity Day, organized for the Puerto Rico meeting by Carlos Castillo-Chavez of Cornell University (left), shown here with his PhD adviser (1984), Fred Brauer of the University of British Columbia (center) and co-organizer Pablo Negron-Marrero of the University of Puerto Rico, Humacao. (Two other co-organizers, William Massey and Pablo Tarazaga, are not pictured.)
