MCSD staff participate in the organization of a variety of conferences, workshops and lecture series. The following are examples of these.
MCSD hosted an invitational workshop in Gaithersburg on July 28-31, 1997 to develop plans for the NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions (DLMF). The DLMF is envisioned as a modern replacement for the NBS Handbook of Mathematical Functions which was first issued in 1964. More than 150,000 copies of the Handbook have been sold by the Government Printing Office and several commercial publishers (it remains available today from these sources). The Handbook contains technical information, such as formulas, graphs and tables, on a variety of mathematical functions of widespread use in the sciences and engineering. The new DLMF would revise and expand this core data and would make use of advanced communications and computational resources to disseminate the information in ways not possible using static print media. Examples include formulas downloadable into symbolic systems, dynamic graphics, reference algorithms and software, tables generated on demand, and application modules tailored to specific domains such as quantum physics. Workshop participants included a number of well-known experts in special functions and their application such as Richard Askey (Univ. Wisc.), Ross Barnett (Univ. Manchester), Claude Brezinski (Univ. Lille), Bill Carlson (Iowa State), Walter Gautschi (Purdue Univ.) Kurt Kolbig (CERN), Leonard Maximon (GWU), Ingram Olkin (Stanford), Frank Olver (Univ. Md. and NIST), and Nico Temme (CWI, Amsterdam). The workshop, organized by Daniel Lozier and Frank Olver of the MCSD, was co-sponsored by the Physics Laboratory, the Standard Reference Data Program, and MEL's Systems for Integrated Manufacturing Applications (SIMA) Program.
Ronald Boisvert of MCSD organized an invited session entitled Scientific Software and the World Wide Web at the 15th IMACS World Congress on Scientific Computation, Modeling and Applied Mathematics, held in Berlin, Germany on August 28, 1997. IMACS is the International Association for Mathematics and Computers in Simulation. The session, which contained talks by Jack Dongarra (Oak Ridge National Lab), Venkat Sastry (Royal Military College of Science), Joachim Luegger (ZIB), John Rice (Purdue) and Boisvert, attracted about 40 participants, and was one of the more well-attended sessions of the conference.
Paul Boggs served on the Organizing Committee of the Second PanAmerican Workshop on Applied and Computational Mathematics which was held in Gramado, Brazil in September 1997.
The MCSD Colloquium Series hosts a variety of speakers on topics related to the division's work. During FY 1997 we hosted 21 speakers. These included Bharat Soni (Mississippi State), Baruch Meerson (Racah Institute of Physics), Paul Fife (Univ. of Utah), Florian Potra (Univ. of Iowa), Tamara Kolda (Univ. of Maryland), Joan Aron (Johns Hopkins University), Nicholas Higham (Univ. of Manchester), Satoshi Sekiguchi (Electrotechnical Laboratory, Japan), Adam Wheeler (Southampton Univ.), Bodo Parady (Sun), Benjamin Melamed (Rutgers), Linda Stals (Univ. Augsburg), Bala Subrahmanyam (NAWC). Also, MCSD staff members D. Lozier, W. Mitchell, S. Lomonaco, F. Olver, B. Alpert, T. Burns made presentations as part of the series.
Pete Stewart present a series of six lectures on elementary matrix decompositions which summarize material in his projected multivolume treatise entitled Matrix Algorithms to be publiahed by SIAM.