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Waterloo Numerical Analysis Symposium

in commemoration of Gene Golub

February 29, 2008

photo of gene golub

Gene Golub, Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, was a pioneer in the field of numerical analysis and also a leader and friend to many in the community of numerical analysts. He passed away at age 75 on November 16, 2007. A brief biography is available from Stanford News Service.

On Friday, February 29, 2008, several symposia will take place concurrently around the world in commemoration of Gene's legacy. University of Waterloo will host one such symposium. The organizers are Alan George and Steve Vavasis.

All talks will take place in DC (Davis Centre) 1304. See: maps and directions. Lunch will be served in DC 1301.

Support

This meeting is supported in part by the Dean of Mathematics of University of Waterloo and in part by NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council).

Schedule

Note a.m. schedule change made on Feb. 28

9:20-9:30 Alan George Welcome  
9:30-9:50 Hans De Sterck (UW) Google's PageRank, multilevel solvers, and Gene's ranking  
9:50-10:10 Yuying Li (UW) What Can Robust Optimization Do for Mean Variance Portfolio Selection? joint with L. Zhu, T. Coleman
10:10-10:50 Break
10:50-11:10 Christina Christara (Toronto) A high-performance method for the biharmonic Dirichlet problem on rectangles joint with J. Zhang
11:10-11:30 Antoine Deza (McMaster) Intriguing analogies between the diameter and curvature joint with T. Terlaky, F. Xie, Y. Zinchenko
11:30-12:20 Chris Paige (McGill University) Keynote Speaker The bidiagonalization algorithms of Gene Golub and William Kahan  
12:20-1:40 Lunch, DC 1301
1:40-2:00 George Labahn (UW) On the Numerical Condition of a Generalized Hankel Eigenvalue Problem joint with B. Beckermann and G. Golub
2:00-2:20 Justin Wan (UW) Moments, Modified Moments, and Multiple Linear Systems joint with G. Golub
2:20-2:40 Jan Modersitzki (McMaster) Numerical Treatment of Landmark Constrained Image Registration  
2:40-3:00 Break
3:00-3:20 Henry Wolkowicz (UW) Regularization and Trust Regions in Optimization  
3:20-3:40 Graham Gladwell (UW) QR and other stories  
3:40-4:00 Stephen Vavasis (UW) SVD and information retrieval joint with M. Biggs and A. Ghodsi

Registration

There is no fee for this conference thanks to the supporters mentioned above, but registration is required in order to provide an accurate count for the caterer. Registration for the symposium closed on Monday, Feb. 25. If you would like to request late registration, please send email to Steve Vavasis (refer to the link above).

Dinner

The conference does not include dinner. Nonetheless, it is expected that several participants will want to have dinner after the meeting, so a dinner group will be assembled informally at approximately 5:30. Since Gene had a fondness for Chinese food, dinner at a Chinese restaurant is a fitting way to end the meeting. There are several Chinese restaurants in the University Plaza, which is a 10-minute walk from the DC building.