Professors Hickernell and Fasshauer Organize Minisymposia

Professor and Chair Fred Hickernell organized a minisymposium on "Optimal Points and Shapes for Numerical Computation" at the recent Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics meeting in Boston. He also spoke on the topic.

In mathematical problems, it's often necessary to sample the input function at a number of points and/or to divide the domain into a number of subdomain. The choices of points and shapes may significantly affect the accuracy of the solution. Hickernell's symposium offered different perspectives on how to choose points and shapes when solving numerical problems.

Hickernell also was a member of the International Program Committee and organized a minisymposium with Applied Mathematics Associate Professor Greg Fasshauer for the 7th International Conference on Monte Carlo and Quasi-Monte Carlo Methods in Scientific Computing 2006 at Ulm University, Germany. The conference brought together experts in mathematics, computer science, statistics, finance, operations research, biology, chemistry, physics, graphics and engineering to discuss the latest developments in Monte Carlo and quasi-Monte Carlo methods and their applications.