ICIAM: Day 3

Ran again this morning, and attended the conference all day.  Here are a couple more photos.

Vancouver harbor

Modern sculpture

ICIAM: Day 2

Had a nice 3 mile run this morning.  Downtown Vancouver is very compact with a clean grid pattern of clean streets.  It is hard to get lost.  I ambled the 1 1/2 miles to the conference and gave my first paper at 10:00 AM.  I may have stirred things up a bit, but got a nice response from the audience.  I had lunch with people from the session I was in--turkey sandwich and soup at a food court.  After lunch it was back to the sessions, where I ran into Aslan Kasimov, a friend from Moscow/UIUC now in Saudi Arabia with my former student Ashraf al-Khateeb.  We had a nice dinner at the spiffy upscale saloon, "The Cactus Club":  spare ribs, peas, and potatoes for JMP.  I took a nice walk back to my hotel for early retirement.  No photos today.

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.

Saturday, 30 April: Corfu to South Bend

I rose at 4:30 AM this morning, and met Sam Paolucci in the lobby at 5:30 AM, where we took a cab to the nearby airport for a 7:00 AM Aegean Air flight to Athens.  About 80% of the conference attendees were on the same flight, so our discipline might be in trouble if there had been a plane crash!

On arrival in Athens, we had to go through security once more.  The flight back to JFK in NYC was against the wind this time, and thus took 10:22 to complete.  The flight was full, and my book on Salonica continued to entertain.  On arrival at JFK, we had to recover our bags, go through customs, and then security one more time.  JFK remains as dumpy as when I left it.  We almost caught a 4:00 PM flight to Chicago, but had to wait for our scheduled 6:30 PM flight, which took off on time.  On arrival at the comparably pleasant O'Hare airport, we found we were in time to catch the 9:15 PM bus to South Bend, which arrived around 1:30 AM.  Sam's wife, Peg, picked us up on campus and dropped me off at my house, where I secured a long sleep.

Friday, 29 April: Day 3 of the Meeting

I was up early again for the 8:30 plenary, and attending talks all morning and early afternoon.  The meeting ended at mid-afternoon.  Colleague Sam Paolucci, former advisor Scott Stewart, his wife Marcy, and I went for dinner in Corfu City.  Street view posted below.

View of Corfu City

I had a fish platter, which was not up to the standard to which the other restaurant had set.  We returned around ten.

Thursday, 28 April: Day 2 of the Meeting

Day 2 began at 8:30 AM with a plenary lecture.  Here is a photo of the lecture which involved a methane detonation in a coal mine in West Virginia.

Plenary lecture at the conference

At mid-afternoon, the conference recessed, and most of us loaded into busses for an island tour.  We came to the so-called Achilleion Palace, built in the late 19th century for Empress of Austria, Elisabeth of Bavaria.  The main theme of the palace was Achilles, depicted below in a commanding victorious pose.

Achilles victorious

The palace is fancy, as can be seen from the photograph of the interior shown below.

Interior of the Achilleion Palace on Corfu

The palace was purchased in 1907 by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany for a summer residence and became a hub of diplomatic activity.  Here is a shot of a terrace on the roof.

Rooftop of the Achilleion Palace on Corfu

 Some of the gardens are shown below along with some conference attendees.

Gardens of the Achilleion Palace

We later recessed to another hotel which put on a fine buffet of Greek delicacies for us. This was accompanied by a live Greek trio playing folk music. Several of the elder statesmen and women of the group engaged, along with some of the children, in festive circular dancing in a spirited style.

Site of the conference banquet

The bus got me back to my hotel around midnight.

Wednesday, 27 April: Day 1 of the Meeting

I'm writing the remainder of these posts from South Bend, after my return as the Corfu internet was too slow for reliability.

The meeting began on Wednesday.  I delivered two lectures, and I was co-author on two others delivered by my colleague Sam Paolucci.  I also chaired a session.  I think the talks went fine.  After the talks, a short walk from the conference venue yielded the view below.

View of Pontikonisi ("Mouse Island") and Vlacheraina monastery seen from the hilltops of Kanoni

A group of about ten of us then commissioned two cabs and a private car in search of sea food.  We were successful.  The restaurant did one thing well:  fresh seafood. Vegetables, bread, atmosphere were clearly second fiddle.  But we were strongly encouraged to visit the kitchen and consider in some detail our sea food choices.  My decision to split a sea bass with two other colleagues was made soon after the viewing below.

My future meal:  sea bass in the hands of its preparer

The bass was great, and we retraced our taxi drive back to the hotel around 11:00 PM.