By Bernard DeconinckJuly 11, 2019 This was a trying year for the Department. Some of these trials were self inflicted, others were inflicted on us. As you read in last year’s newsletter, we celebrated 50 years of Applied Mathematics at UW this year by organizing a big research conference, coupled with some reunion gatherings. This was self inflicted: organizing all of this was a lot of work, but it was worth it: it was great seeing so many familiar faces again, and the scientific…

By Bernard Deconinck When Carl Pearson came to UW from Boeing in 1967, he became a faculty member jointly appointed in the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department in the College of Engineering, and in the Department of Mathematics in the College of Arts & Sciences. Two years later he was asked to co-chair, together with Victor Klee (Mathematics), a university-wide committee exploring the role of applied mathematics at UW, and to make appropriate recommendations. This committee…

Eric Shea-Brown, Adrienne Fairhall, and Christof Koch (President, Allen Institute for Brain Science) at the UW/Allen Institute Summer Workshop on the Dynamic Brain, which they co-direct together with Michael Buice and Shawn Olsen (Allen Institute). By Eric Shea-Brown, Adrienne Fairhall, and Jessica Huszar Recent years have found that mathematics, that wondrous invention of the brain, can be turned around to help understand the workings of the brain itself.  Neuroscience is…

By Samuel Rudy I visited the University of Washington as a prospective graduate student just over five years ago. I stayed with a student in Fremont, went climbing, ate great food, and enjoyed the seemingly laid back nature of the department. That weekend alone was enough to sell me on coming here. What really set applied math at the University of Washington apart to me was that the people in the department had such different academic backgrounds and interests. Fitting in with the…

By Soraya Terrab After an undergraduate in Physics, I completed an MS in Mechanical Engineering in 2015 and worked in industry. I started as a manufacturing engineer and later stepped into a quality manager role. Not before long, I was unsure where my career in engineering was heading and I became nostalgic for the classroom environment and the entrancing mathematical derivations that kept me hooked on assignments and projects for periods without end. From physics to engineering, I was…

By Anne Greenbaum  Scientific computing and numerical analysis lie at the core of Applied Mathematics. From structural engineering to climate modeling to computational neuroscience and finance, all areas of applied math rely heavily on computation. Typically, the physical world is modeled through differential equations, which are then replaced by linear or nonlinear algebraic equations, which one can attempt to solve on a computer. Questions about existence and uniqueness of…

By Matthew Lorig From late March to early June this year, I had the pleasure of working as a Visiting Professor at the University of Chile, which is located in Chile's largest city, Santiago. I moved to Santiago with my family when I was 12 and remained there until I graduated from high school. So, in addition to being a fantastic opportunity to work at a world-class institution, my recent visit to the University of Chile was a return home.  During my visit, I was hosted by…

By Yian Ma Data science is fueling the change of our society. It is altering the ways we perceive and participate in industries such as mass media, politics, finance, retail business, manufacturing, and health care. On a more institutional level, it is also changing the ways corporations and organizations operate. Many entrepreneurs agree that a major difference between a modern internet-age company and a traditional one lies in their decision making processes. In modern companies,…

By Ryan Donnelly I began working at the University of Washington in September 2017 as a Research Associate. Before that, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Finance Institute at  ́Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). I spent a couple of years in both positions, so I think I managed to learn quite a bit about both cities, Lausanne and Seattle. Not only are the two cities very different in size (Seattle is about five times larger), but it probably comes as…

By Jeremy Upsal The 2018-2019 school year is the second full year of the diversity committee operating in the Department of Applied Mathematics, but this is our first newsletter. The Diversity Committee is a departmental-appointed committee composed of students, faculty, and staff. In 2018-2019, the committee consisted of Karen…

Congratulations to all of our graduates!Doctors of PhilosophyKathleen Champion Advisor: J. Nathan KutzFrom data to dynamics: discovering governing equations from data.Samuel Rudy Advisor: J. Nathan KutzComputational methods for system identification and data-driven forecastingPeng Zheng Advisor: Aleksandr AravkinRobust Modeling and Algorithm Design for Science and EngineeringMaster of Science in Applied MathematicsDaniel J. Armagost   …

SIAM UW AwardRecipient: Katherine OwensFor exceptional service to the University of Washington Chapter of SIAM for the 2018-2019 academic year. Joseph Hammack Endowment AwardRecipient: Yu-Chen ChengFor exemplary work by a student in the Department of Applied Mathematics.Tung Family Endowment AwardRecipient: Shane ShangFor exemplary work by a student in the Department of Applied Mathematics. Boeing Teaching Award, StudentRecipient: Kelsey Marcinko…