<p>News Title: Professor Grady Wright gave a plenary lecture on October 28, 2017 in SIAMPNW 2017 Conference </p><p>Professor Grady Wright was one of the four invited plenary speakers in the 1st Biennial Meeting of Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics Pacific Northwest Section (SIAMPNW) 2017, October 27-29, in Corvallis, OR. Dr. Wright’s plenary lecture on 10/28/2017 was entitled ‘Computing with functions in spherical and polar geometries’. Spherical and polar geometries are ubiquitous in computational science and engineering, arising in, for example, weather and climate forecasting, geophysics, and astrophysics. Central to many of these applications is the task of developing efficient and accurate approximations of functions defined on the surface of the unit sphere or on the disk. Dr. Wright presented a new low rank method for this task by combining an iterative, structure-preserving variant of Gaussian elimination together with the classic double Fourier sphere method. </p><p>Associate Professor Donna Calhoun, Leming Qu, Ph.D student Kathlyn Drake also attended the SIAMPNW2017 Conference. Dr. Calhoun presented her work on ‘Simulation of volcanic ash transport using parallel, adaptive Ash3d’. Dr. Qu presented his work on ‘Copula density estimation by Lagrange interpolation at the Padua Points’. Kathlyn Drake presented her work on ‘a stable algorithm for divergence and curl-free radial basis functions in the flat limit’.</p><p>Picture above: Professor Wright delivered a plenary lecture in SIAMPNW2017 in Oct. 28, 2017.</p>