The algebra community who attended the 2011 Fall central Sectional Meeting of the American Mathematical Society pose on the UNL campus during the Oct. 14-15 meeting.
The Math Department had the honor of hosting the 2011 Fall Central Sectional Meeting of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) on Oct. 14-15, 2011. This is only the third AMS meeting held at UNL; the previous meeting was in 2005, and the one before that was held in 1987.
This year's conference was well attended, with 441 official registrants coming from across the country and internationally. Of these 441 attendees, 324 gave talks. The talks were divided by discipline into 20 sessions, 11 of which had an organizer or co-organizer currently on the Math Department faculty with one further session organized by faculty at other institutions who were formerly graduate students of the Math Department and a poster session organized by two current Math Department grad students.
In addition there were three talks by internationally prominent mathematicians: Lewis P. Bowen of Texas A&M spoke on "Entropy theory for actions of sofic groups"; Alina Cojocaru of the University of Illinois-Chicago spoke on "Questions about the reductions modulo primes of an elliptic curve"; and Michael Zieve of the University of Michigan spoke on "The happy marriage between arithmetic geometry and dynamical systems."
A special highlight of the meeting was the 2011 Erdos Memorial Lecture, given by Emmanuel Candes of Stanford University, titled "Recovering the unseen: Some recent advances in low-rank matrix reconstruction." An enjoyable wine and cheese reception followed Professor Candes's stimulating talk.
One very enjoyable aspect of the meeting was the opportunity to meet up with the many people who came to the conference who have ties to the Department. Here is a list of the current and former UNL faculty, post-docs, grad students and long-term visitors who either organized sessions or spoke at the meeting. The list also includes a few people who were not speakers but who have ties to the Department and came to take in talks or just to say hello:
Ahrendt, Chris; Ananthnarayan, H.; Anderson, Douglas; Atici, Ferhan; Avalos, George; Avery, Rich; Axvig, Nathan; Baeth, Nicholas; Berger, Heidi Feller; Bociu, Lorena; Brittenham, Mark; Celikbas, Ela; Celikbas, Olgur; Cooper, Susan; Christensen, Lars Winther; Curto, Carina; Dahal, Rajendra; Davis, Jennifer Everson; Denkert, Annika; Donsig, Allan; Duncan, Benton; Erbe, Lynn; Eubanks-Turner, Christina; Geisbauer, Joe; Gibbons, Courtney; Goodrich, Christopher; Grilliette, Will; Harbourne, Brian; Harmsen, Betty Jean; Hartke, Stephen; Hermiller, Susan; Higgins, Raegan; Henriques, Ines; Holay, Sandeep; Hummel, Livia Miller; Hummel, Ned; Itskov, Vladimir; Janssen, Mike; Johnson, Brian; Jia, Bao-Ping; Karr, Ryan; Kattchee, Karl; Kelley, Christine; Kilibarda, Vesna; Langdon, Jennifer; Leuschke, Graham; Li, Aihua; Lynch, Laura; McCune, David; McDonnell, Lori; Meakin, John; Milan, David; Moore, Frank; Morrison, Katherine; Peterson, Allan; Pitts, David; Radcliffe, Jamie; Radu, Petronela; Rahmati,Hamid; Rammaha, Mohammad; Sabalka, Lucas; Saccon, Silvia; Sapir, Mark; Sather-Wagstaff, Sean; Seceleanu, Alexandra; Sega, Liana; Sunic, Zoran; Takahashi, Ryo; Toundykov, Daniel; Veliz-Cuba, Alan; and Walker, Judy.
Credit for the meeting's success is thanks to the efforts of many faculty and graduate students and staff throughout the Department, but perhaps no one more than the Department's conference coordinator Marilyn Johnson, who assisted local liaison and faculty member Brian Harbourne in making arrangements for the meeting.
-Brian Harbourne