Steve Smale Speaks in "Data-driven Control and Optimization"

As part of the its special year on Optimization, the IMA hosted a "Hot Topics" workshop entitled "Data-driven Control and Optimization" , 4-6 December 2002. The key theme of this workshop was that, while 20th century science was driven by the search for elementary deterministic mathematical laws, we must now supplement-and in some cases even supplant-this knowledge with information extracted from empirical data.

The kickoff speaker at this event was the fields medalist Steve Smale, whose talk, "Fast Algorithms for Dealing with Data and Understanding Them," dealt with the age-old problem of interpolating a curve through data points.