IMA Threads

IMA programs proceed on many time-scales, ranging from a highly focused workshop of a couple of days, through workshops and clusters of related workshops, through quarters of concentration and annual thematic years, to longer threads which carry over from year to year as a subject develops. These threads are an important mechanism, by which the IMA builds on earlier experiences. One program may suggest ideas for another. Communities and individuals which have become familiar to the IMA in an earlier program become a resource in developing another.

In the summer 2003 issue of Update, we discussed Material Science. The present issue, we focus on the Mathematics of Uncertainty. Threads such as Biology, Discrete Mathematics, Computation and others, will be presented in future issues.

Mathematics of Uncertainty. Applications of probability and statistics to problems of great importance is a thread that runs through many of the IMA programs. Many of the programs addresses the issue of how to deal with uncertainty in data and modeling.

• 1983-1984 Mathematical Models for the Economics of Decentralized Resource Allocation. Winter quarter workshop in Bayesian analysis in economics and game theory.
• 1985-1986 Stochastic Differential Equations and their Applications. Year long program.
• 1987-1988 Applied Combinatorics. Spring quarter symposium on statistical theory of experimental design.
• 1988 Summer program: Robust statistics and diagnostics.
• 1992-1993 Control Theory and its Applications. Fall quarter workshop on robust control theory; spring quarter workshop on mathematical finance.
• 1993-1994 Emerging Applications of Probability. Year long program including the winter quarter workshop on stochastic networks.
• 1994-1995 Waves and Scattering. Fall quarter workshop on waves in random and other complex media.
• 1997 Summer program: Statistics in the Health Sciences.
• 1999 Hot topics workshop -- Decision making under uncertainty: Energy and environmental models.
• 1999 Hot topics workshop -- Decision making under uncertainty: Assessment of the reliability of mathematical models.
• 2000 Hot topics workshop -- Modeling and analysis of noise in integrated circuits and systems.
• 2001-2002 Mathematics in the Geosciences. Spring quarter workshops on inverse problems and quantification of uncertainty and on point processes in geophysics.
• 2002-2003 Optimization. Winter workshop on semidefinite programming and robust optimization.
• 2003 Summer Program: Probability and Partial Differential Equations in Modern Applied Mathematics.
• 2003-2004 Probability and Statistics in Complex Systems. Year long program.