Days 1&2 in Vancouver

Yesterday I commenced a 16 visit to the west coast for some business and a few visits. A cab took me to South Bend Regional Airport where I boarded a 1:05 PM Delta flight to Minneapolis.  I had a long layover there where I found some nice food in the French Market Cafe (I'd been there before and knew enough to return).  The crowd was busy watching the soccer match as the US women took it on the chin.  I'm still skeptical that the middle-aged US yuppies watching the game really are soccer fans; a finite chance exists that they'd rather be watching tractor pulls, save for the cachet that soccer brings.  The 5:15 PM Delta took me into Vancouver International around 7:30 PM.  The airport is spotless and beautiful.  I saw a former student from ND, now at U. Chicago, on the train downtown.  He was on his way to the same meeting as me, the International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM).

From my train stop, I took the five minute walk to my hotel, on the peninsula which forms the downtown area of Vancouver.  My hotel, the Cascadia, is on the border, safe enough and clean enough, but otherwise unremarkable.  The town itself is spiffy and expensive.  The streets are in a grid, well maintained with lots of bike paths.  They've even got special traffic signals for the many bikers.  I grabbed a snack of very spicy chicken at a simple and modern chain store, which hit the mark before bed.

I got up this morning and took a 3 mile run through the quiet streets.  I ran by my meeting site, which is in the spectacular convention center, overlooking Coal Harbor.  Grabbed a quick breakfast at the hotel, and walked back to the meeting.  Here is a shot of the venue exterior.

Exterior of Vancouver Convention Center

I then went to the 8:30 AM opening remarks; tedious.  At the close, we had the benefit of a native dance troop accompanied by loud drums and chant.  You can glimpse some of them next.

Aboriginal entertainment at 9:10 AM

This is a large meeting, well over 1000 attendees.  It is the major world event in applied mathematics this year, and I will be participating two talks later in the week; I deliver one tomorrow, and my student will on Thursday.

I attended meetings from 10-12.  My Notre Dame colleague from physics, Dinshaw Balsara gave a talk, and later Dinshaw and my graduate student Josh Mengers took in a so-so lunch, composed for me of a chicken panini sandwich in a restaurant with questionable cleanliness standards. Here is a shot of the conference area after lunch. 

Exterior of conference center with more sun than the morning.

 The statue looks like I ran out of RAM on my digital camera, but it is actually pixelated in real life.  Here is a shot pointing towards downtown.

View of downtown Vancouver

 Here is a shot of the sunnier harbor.

Vancouver harbor.

 I went to more afternoon sessions.  When they got boring, I caught up on email.  Had a nice discussion with another ND colleague from the applied math department.  I then grabbed a quick burrito of marginal quality, and went to the von Neumann Memorial lecture.  It was wonderful and delivered by Prof. Ingrid Daubchies, now of Duke University.  She pioneered wavelets.  Among other things they are widely used in .jpeg2000 image data compression.  Your web browser runs MUCH faster thanks to Ingrid.  And she gives a fine talk.  The followup talk was not so good, so I checked out.  One of my heros, Prof. G. Strang of MIT agreed with me I think, as he checked out at the same time.  We had a brief chat, and then I took the 1 1/2 mile walk back to the Cascadia, pictured below behind the scaffolding.

The Cascadia.