IMA Outcomes

How do you measure the impact of an experience? Can we trace the origins of our ideas and our opinions? At the IMA, we can count the ever-growing numbers of visitors hosted, workshops organized, and papers produced, but the true value of those achievements lies in our unquantifiable successes — the collaboration born of a coffee break conversation or the insight sparked by an initial clash of disciplinary perspectives. The IMA environment is designed to nuture creativity and intellectual growth, improving the odds of that serendipitous click of understanding and providing the resources needed to explore the new territory opened up when old barriers are unlocked.

Training young mathematicians and connecting them with established researchers is a key component of the IMA's mission. Each summer the IMA offers a program specifically for graduate students. Every other summer the IMA organizes an Industrial Math Modeling Workshop for Graduate Students. In this issue we look back to the two IMA summer graduate student programs of 1998 and the impact those programs had on two student participants.

From student to coauthor. Xiao-Song Lin and Ilya Kofman both took part in the IMA graduate student summer program on Topology of Manifolds in 1998 — Lin as an instructor and Kofman as a student. Now the two are collaborators, with a publication in Topology (2003). Kofman writes "I remember that summer as the most mathematically enriching summer of my graduate education. The program was structured to provide many hours of time for conversation with the instructors, and I took full advantage of it. I recall the thrill of seeing new insights on active research topics, and it had an energizing effect on my graduate education." Kofman's thesis was a direct outcome of his interaction with Lin.

A career shaped by the IMA. Nilima Nigam writes that her eyes were opened at the Industrial Math Modeling Workshop. Thrilled by the examples she saw of the power of mathematics to solve industrial problems, she applied and was accepted to the IMA industrial postdoc program, working with Seagate. At the IMA, mentored by Fernando Reitich of the School of Mathematics and Minnesota Center for Industrial Mathematics (University of Minnesota), she studied fast multipole methods and applied them to micromagnetics problems, enabling Seagate to model read-heads of unprecedented geometrical complexity.

Nigam now shares the insight and expertise she gained at the IMA with other young mathematicians. She served as a mentor at the 7th PIMS-IMA Industrial Problem Solving Workshop in summer 2003. She is a member of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McGill University and is actively involved in developing the department's ties to industry. Her current research focuses on on the development and analysis of numerical methods for exterior scattering problems, computational electromagnetics and micromagnetics.