SIAM Announcement
Figure 1. Ken Golden taking a sea ice core in Antarctica, with the icebreaker Aurora
Australis in the background. Photo by Adam Gully during the Sea Ice Physics and
Ecosystem eXperiment (SIPEX), 2007.
Once again, several of the SIAM activities at the 2009 American Mathematical Society
(AMS)/ Mathematical Association of America (MAA) Joint Mathematics Meetings[4]
have a Climate and Sustainability theme. The SIAM Invited Address will be delivered
by Ken Golden, on Mathematics of sea ice to help predict climate change. Golden,
Professor of Mathematics at the University of Utah, regularly travels to the Arctic and
Antarctic to collect data on the fluid and electrical transport properties of sea ice, and
his talks combine math and science with polar beauty and a sense of adventure [5-6]. He
will also run a minisymposium on Polar Climate Modeling in collaboration with David
Holland, and Deborah Sulsky. There will be a minisymposium on Mathematical
Modeling of Natural Resources, organized by Catherine A. Roberts, and two
minisymposia on energy: Mathematical and Computational Challenges in Global
Climate and Energy Processes, organized by Margot Gerritsen, Chair of the SIAG on
Geosciences, and The Mathematics of Energy Conversion, organized by Keith
Promislow. For more information, see [7].
In addition to the SIAM activities at the 2009 Joint Mathematics Meeting, Tom Pfaff
will be running an MAA Minicourse on Educating about the state of the planet and
sustainability while enhancing calculus [7], and there will be an MAA session and
discussion on Environmental Mathematics: Getting it in the curriculum organized by
Karen Bolinger and Ben Fusaro. These events are particularly well timed in view of the
upcoming 2009 Math Awareness Month (see below).