SSMC 2023 Schedule

Keynote Speakers Titles and Abstracts

Alexander Hoover

Life in Resonance: Modeling and Neuromechanics in Propulsion and Fluid Transport

For many organisms, swimming and flying emerges from the transfer of momentum from an animal’s body to the local fluid environment. The complex kinematics that drive these processes emerge from the coupling between the material properties of a flexible body and the fluid in which they move, as well as the neural processes that drive the control of these systems. In this talk, we will discuss the role three types of resonance play in driving animal locomotion using an immersed boundary framework. We will focus on how in-silico experiments and dimensional analysis can driving understanding and intuition in biomechanical systems.

Mary Lynn Reed

Reflections on a “Diverse” Career in Mathematics 

Dr. Mary Lynn Reed has frequently described herself as a ‘walking mathematics career panel.’ She’s held mathematically-oriented jobs in academia, government, actuarial consulting, non-profit research, and the software industry. In addition to her individual contributions, she’s also served in a variety of leadership positions, including Chief/Mathematics Research at the National Security Agency. She is currently a Professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT); and she serves on the Board of Trustees for the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a non-profit research corporation. In this talk, she will offer some reflections on her ‘diverse’ career and will briefly highlight some new research questions she is pursuing (with RIT students) in the area of cyber & crypto economics.

Seth Sullivant 

Maximum Agreement Subtrees

Probability distributions on the set of trees are fundamental in evolutionary biology, as models for speciation processes. These probability models for random trees have interesting mathematical features and lead to difficult questions at the boundary of combinatorics and probability. This talk will be concerned with the question of how much two random trees have in common, where the measure of commonality is the size of the largest agreement subtree. The case of maximum agreement subtrees of pairs of random comb trees is equivalent to studying longest increasing subsequences of random permutations, and has connections to random matrices. This elementary talk will try to give a sense of what is known (not very much) and what is unknown (lots!) about this problem.

Participant Speakers Titles and Abstracts

Downloadable link: Titles and Abstracts of Participant Speakers