Number 2, June 1997.
Number 2, June 1997.
Laureano Gonzalez-Vega, University of Cantabria, Santander, Spain.
Email: gvega@matesco.unican.es
The Foundations of Computational Mathematics'97 conference was held at IMPA, Rio de Janeiro, Jan 5-12 1997. This was the second FoCM conference, being the first one held at Park City, Utah (USA), July 17-August 11, 1995. The purpose of the FoCM council is to held the FoCM conference every two years. More information on FoCM can be obtained through the web page http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/na/FoCM/FoCM.html .
There were 145 registered participants to the FoCM'97 Conference, most of them from abroad. One volume of Proceedings (F. Cucker and M. Shub, eds, Foundations of Computational Mathematics, Springer, 1997, xv+441 pages) and one issue of the Journal of Complexity (Vol. 12, Number 4, Dec 1996, pp 254-623) cover most of the 12 plenary talks and 113 ordinary talks given in 9 workshops. Every day 2 plenary talks were delivered in the morning while the different workshops run in the afternoon.
Some of the topics of the conference were: systems of algebraic equations and computational algebraic geometry, homotopy methods, real machines, information-based complexity, numerical linear algebra, approximation and PDEs, optimization, differential equations and dynamical systems, relations to computer science, vision and related computational tools.
The plenary talks were given by Charles Bennett, Ronald Coifman, Misha Gromov, Laszlo Lovasz, Robert Mackay, David Mumford, Yuri Nesterov, Jesus Sanz-Serna, Steve Smale, Nick Trefethen, Grzegorz Wasilkowski, and Andrei Zelevinsky.
The official social events during the conference included an excursion to the tropical islands, a welcome cocktail, an all-you-can-eat dinner at a churrascaria, and a barbecue with party, brasilian music and samba accompanied by a tropical rainstorm. The conference organization was extremely good and the atmosphere at the IMPA was really warm: it is not usual (at least in Europe) to see, through the windows of a mathematics building, monkeys jumping from one tree to another .
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