Subfactor theory is a subject from operator algebras, with many surprising connections to other areas of mathematics. This summer school will be devoted to understanding the representation theory of subfactors, with a particular emphasis on connections to quantum symmetries, fusion categories, planar algebras, and random matrices

This workshop will focus on preparing each participant for a successful career as a mathematician at a college or university. Beginning with the hiring process, a thorough discussion of the various elements of the application packet will take place in the context of each participant's materials. Working individually with experienced faculty, participants will review and refine their cover letters, C.V., research, and teaching statements. This will be followed by activities related to the interview. The primary goals of the workshop are to develop an understanding of the hiring process from the institutions' perspective, to refine the application packet, to learn what to expect during the interview process (including the job talk), and to prepare for negotiating salary and start-up packages.

Additional time will be spent on aspects of the pre-tenure years including the development of a research program, writing grant proposals, and mentoring research students. The three-day workshop will consist of one-on-one work with experienced mentors, small group discussions, critique of written materials, plenary sessions, and time for individual work and consultation.

The purpose of the school will be to introduce graduate students to foundational results in commutative algebra, with particular emphasis of the diversity of the related topics with commutative algebra. Some of these topics are developing remarkably in this decade and through learning those subjects the graduate students will be stimulated toward future research. 

Success rates in mathematics as well as recruitment and retention rates in the mathematics pipeline are low at all education levels and are, across predictable demographics, disproportionately low for students who are women, Latin@, Black, American Indian, recent immigrants, emergent bilinguals/multilinguals, and poor. Efforts to address these low rates often focus on programmatic solutions such as creating mentoring or bridge programs to address perceived deficiencies. While these programs achieve some success, evidence suggests that they may not substantially improve students’ subsequent success in mathematics or meaningfully address the ways that students experience mathematics instruction.

The 2017 CIME workshop will focus on observations of mathematics classrooms through the lens of equity. Specifically, we will use observation as a tool for understanding and improving imbalances of access, participation, and power in mathematics teaching and learning. In doing so, we seek to better understand students’ experiences in mathematics classrooms in order to improve academic success, recruitment and retention, and meaningful experiences for historically marginalized populations.

Five questions structure the highly interactive design of the workshop:

1. What does it mean to create an equitable classroom environment? How can the structure of classroom interactions lead to imbalances of access, identity, and power in mathematics teaching and learning? How can such structures be rebuilt to better serve all students?
2. How might observations of mathematics instruction help us to identify power dynamics in classrooms? What language is helpful to describe interactions in mathematics classrooms? What might we learn from observations about how culture and identity are developed for some students but not others? What do classroom observations reveal about how instruction supports or discourages engagement in mathematics for students of different backgrounds?
3. What does it mean to observe interactions in a mathematics classroom with an eye towards equity? What language is helpful to describe interactions in mathematics classrooms? How do we observe and describe interactions among students, between students and mathematics, between students and instructors, and between students and resources (i.e., textbooks, computers, chalkboards, manipulatives)?
4. What professional experiences can support mathematics instructors to learn how to observe for, describe, interpret, and productively address interactions in the mathematics classroom from the lens of equity? What professional experiences can support mathematics instructors to increase the number of equitable interactions and decrease the number of inequitable ones in their classrooms?
5. What measures might be useful in tracking our progress in learning to see, describe, interpret, and productively address (in)equitable interactions in mathematics classrooms? What measures and tools might be useful in tracking the impacts on instruction and student learning? How might we develop infrastructure to help with this work (video library, faculty resources, etc.)?

Bringing together new and experienced leaders of Math Circles and other similar outreach programs, this year’s Circle on the Road will include discussions, presentations, and opportunities to facilitate different mathematical problems. In addition, some informal STEM education researchers will join us to further our research and evaluation efforts.

Tropical geometry uses a combination of techniques from algebraic geometry, combinatorics, and convex polyhedral geometry to study degenerations of algebraic varieties; the simplest tropical objects are tropical curves, which one can think of as "shadows" of algebraic curves.  Linear equivalence of divisors on an abstract tropical curve is determined by a simple but rich combinatorial process called "chip firing", which was discovered independently in the discrete setting by physicists and graph theorists.  From a pedagogical point of view, one can view tropical curves as a combinatorial model for the highly analogous but more abstract theory of algebraic curves, but there is in fact much more to the story than this: one can use tropical curves and chip firing to prove theorems in algebraic geometry and number theory.  This field is relatively new, so participants will have the opportunity to start from scratch and still get a glimpse of the cutting edge in this active research area.

Ab initio or first principle electronic structure theories, particularly represented by Kohn-Sham density functional theory (KS-DFT), have been developed into workhorse tools with a wide range of scientific applications in chemistry, physics, materials science, biology etc. What is needed are new techniques that greatly extend the applicability and versatility of these approaches. At the core, many of the challenges that need to be addressed are essentially mathematical. The purpose of the workshop is to provide graduate students a self-contained introduction to electronic structure theory, with particular emphasis on frontier topics in aspects of applied analysis and numerical methods. 

Character Theory of Finite Groups provides one of the most powerful tools to study groups. In this course we will give a gentle introduction to basic results in the Character Theory, as well as some of the main conjectures in Group Representation Theory, with particular emphasis on the McKay Conjecture.

Group Photo

This school is oriented to the presentation of theory, algorithms and applications for the solution of mixed integer nonlinear problems (MINLP). This type of problems appears in numerous application areas where the modelization of nonlinear phenomena with logical constraints is important; we must remember here the memorable phrase “the world is nonlinear”. Nowadays the theoretical aspects of this area are spread in a number of recent papers which makes it difficult, for non-specialist, to have a solid background of the existing results and new advances in the field. This school aims to organize and present this material in an organized way. Moreover, it also pursues to link theory with actual applications. In particular, remarkable applications can be found in air traffic control agencies, the air companies, the electric power generation companies, the chemical complex units, the analysis of financial products usually associated with risk dealing and in the algorithms in the statistical field and artificial intelligence as for instance artificial neural networks, or supporting vector machines, among many others.

The goal of the workshop is to present harmonic analysis techniques in $R^n$ (the ``flat" setting), and then to show how those techniques extend to much rougher settings, with application to the theory of elliptic equations. Thus, the subject matter of the workshop will introduce the students to an active, current research area:  the interface between harmonic analysis, elliptic PDE, and geometric measure theory.

Group Photo

The MSRI-UP summer program is designed for undergraduate students who have completed two years of university-level mathematics courses and would like to conduct research in the mathematical sciences. Due to funding restrictions, only U.S. citizens and permanent residents are eligible to apply and the program cannot accept foreign students regardless of funding. The academic portion of the 2016 program will be led by Prof. Luis Garcia-Puente of Sam Houston State University.

The purpose of this summer school is to focus on the interplay of dynamical and biological systems, developing the rich connectionbetween science and mathematics that has been so successful to date. Our focus will be on understanding the mathematical structure of dynamical systems that come from biological problems, and then relating the mathematical structures back to the biology to provide scientific insight. We will focus on five key areas: complex bio-networks, multi scale biological dynamics, biological waves, nonlinear dynamics of pattern formation, and disease dynamics. For each of the five key areas, we will invite 2-3 world leaders who are also excellent communicators to deliver a series of 2-4 one-hour lectures. We expect an average of eight hours of lecture per subject area, spread over approximately two weeks.

Bay Area Discrete Math Days are one-day meetings aimed at facilitating communication between researchers and graduate students of discrete mathematics around the San Francisco Bay Area.These days happen semi-annually and strive to create an informal atmosphere to talk about discrete mathematics. The term "discrete mathematics" is chosen to include at least the following topics: Algebraic and Enumerative Combinatorics, Discrete Geometry, Graph Theory, Coding and Design Theory, Combinatorial Aspects of Computational Algebra and Geometry, Combinatorial Optimization, Probabilistic Combinatorics, and Combinatorics in Mathematical Physics

The 2016 CIME workshop focuses directly on the teaching of mathematics at the university and precollege levels. Teaching is not easy to examine in disciplined ways because it is so familiar and seems so obvious.  Although teaching shapes students’ opportunities to learn, what teachers are actually doing is difficult to observe and describe. This impedes work on improving teaching.
 
This workshop will offer the opportunity to study and talk closely about mathematics teaching through close observation and discussion of video tapes in a setting that will bring together professionals with a range of perspectives, knowledge, experience, and orientations. The goal of the workshop is to develop language and methods for describing, analyzing and evaluating what can be seen in the classroom, with the ultimate goal of helping us shape and improve teaching — our own and more broadly.
 
Four questions structure the highly interactive design of the workshop:

1. What skills are needed for observing teaching in ways that inform improvement efforts? What is involved in observing teaching? What is the teacher saying and doing? What are students saying and doing? What is the mathematics at play? What else is happening? And what do these imply for teaching?
2. How can the practice and use of observation be structured in order to improve mathematics teaching? What approaches are available? What are their strengths and weaknesses?
3. Observation-based assessment of teaching: Why, what, and how? What are the risks?
4. How can we develop and sustain a cross-professional community that observes and evaluates teaching in such a way that different communities communicate with and learn from each other to support a cycle of improvement in the teaching of mathematics at all levels?

The workshop will provide a library of videos of mathematics teaching for study. In addition, participants are encouraged to submit a short video clip of their own teaching, together with a brief background commentary.  These videos will provide a central text for our collective work on discussing and assessing mathematics teaching.

Group Photo

As part of the Mathematical Sciences Collaborative Diversity Initiatives, nine mathematics institutes are pleased to host their annual SACNAS pre-conference event, the 2015 Modern Math Workshop (MMW). The Modern Math Workshop is intended to encourage minority undergraduates to pursue careers in the mathematical sciences and to assist undergraduates, graduate students and recent PhD’s in building their research networks.

The purpose of this two week workshop is to introduce graduate students to state-of-the-art methods and results in mathematical fluid dynamics. In the first week, we will discuss the mathematical foundations and modern analysis aspects of the Navier-Stokes and Euler equations. In the second week, we will run two courses concurrently on the topics of inviscid limits and hydrodynamic stability. Specifically, one course will focus on boundary layers in high Reynolds number flows and the Prandtl equations while the other will focus on mixing and connections to turbulence. Through the lectures and associated problem sessions, the students will learn about a number of new analysis tools and principles of fluid mechanics that are not always taught in a graduate school curriculum.

These courses will give students a full overview of the results of Zhang and Maynard on gaps between primes, and will provide them will a clear understanding of the tools involved. This will make accessible a significant part of modern analytic number theory. The lecturers will also make sure to include, within their course, examples and discussions going further than is strictly required to understand the proofs of Zhang and Maynard, e.g., in the direction of automorphic forms and the Riemann Hypothesis over finite fields.