SAMSI Research Develops Improved Estimates of Ocean Heat Content Changes
Ongoing research at the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI) has produced improved estimates of ocean heat content leading to a better understanding of which regions of the ocean are warming up and which ones are cooling down. This animation shows monthly vertically integrated ocean heat content anomalies for 2007-2016 using data from Argo profiling floats from the...
The 2016-17 IAS program on Homological Mirror Symmetry (HMS)
Homological Mirror Symmetry Image by Ailsa Keating, used with permission The subject of the program in context HMS started with Kontsevich’s 1994 ICM address. By now, it is a mature area of mathematics in its own right, but still one that can be approached from many different directions, which interact fruitfully even when they remain formally (in the theorem-and-proof sense) independent. More...
A Few Self-driving Cars Can Dramatically Improve Traffic Flow
The presence of just a few autonomous vehicles can eliminate the stop-and-go driving of the human drivers in traffic. Under normal circumstances, human drivers naturally create stop-and-go traffic, even in the absence of bottlenecks, lane changes, merges or other disruptions. A small percentage of autonomous vehicles can have a significant impact on the road, eliminating waves and reducing the...
SAMSI & NC Central University Host Forensic Science Research Workshop
David Banks, SAMSI Director, gives a talk on how statistics is used in the legal system during the Statistics in the Criminal Justice System Workshop, Mar. 24. Banks talked about his experiences appearing as an expert witness in a trial that centered on discriminatory practices used in law enforcement. The workshop was held at NCCU and was offered to undergraduate and graduate students...
Fall 2018 Emphasis Program: Analyzing Macro and Micro Population Models
MBI’s Fall 2018 Emphasis Program will look at problems in modeling micro- and macro- populations in biological studies. From DNA molecules and viruses to humans, the collective behavior of individual components gives rise to the overall dynamics of the biological system. The program will explore mathematical, statistical and biological perspectives on analyzing data from such systems and on...
SAMSI Kicks Off 2017-2018 Programs on Environment and High-Dimensional Data Sampling
Richard Smith, Director of SAMSI, opens the CLIM Opening Workshop at the N.C. Biotechnology Center on Aug. 21, 2017. The workshop marks the beginning of the CLIM Program, focused on using data and climate models to analyze environmental changes on our Earth. Much like universities around the country beginning their fall semesters, SAMSI also kicked off their 2017-2018 year-long programs’...
Graduate Students get Practical Experience in Math and Statistics Research at 2017 IMSM
A graduate student and her group present findings on a problem posed by one of the many program partners at the 2017 IMSM Workshop on the campus of North Carolina State University from July 17-26. The workshop exposes graduate students to methods used by industry and national labs to solve real world problems. SAMSI completed the 2017 Industrial Math/Stat Modeling Workshop for Graduate Students...
Trisections
Understanding four dimensional structures or manifolds is both a mysterious and complex task. The goal of the AIM workshop ‘Trisections and low-dimensional topology’ held in March of 2017 was to study these four dimensional objects with a new perspective introduced by David Gay and Robion Kirby in 2012. In three dimensions it has been known for a fairly long time that closed manifolds can be...
Waves, Kakeya sets, and Diophantine equations
Ciprian Demeter A central problem in Physics is to understand the complicated ways in which waves can interact with one another. The field of Harmonic Analysis grew out of the observation that any natural signal that is periodic in time can be built by superimposing simple waves with whole number frequencies. In geometric optics, quantum mechanics, and the study of water waves, we must...
SAMSI Brings Astronomers and Statisticians Together to Study Universe
Contributed by: Jim Barrett, Ph.D. student, School of Physics & Astronomy, University of Birmingham, UK Maya Fishbach, Ph.D. student, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Chicago, USA Bo Ning, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Statistics, North Carolina State University, USA Daniel Wysocki, Ph.D. student, School of Physics & Astronomy’s Astrophysical Sciences & Technology...