ILAS-Net 2023
Message Archive
| 2023 December 31 ILAS-NET Message no. 2510 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Daniel B. Szyld SUBJECT: New Year, new ILAS-net Manager Dear ILAS Members: Happy New Year to all! I look forward to seeing many of you at the Joint Mathematical Meetings in San Francisco next week. As you know, ILAS is a partner at the meeting, and we have an ILAS invited address, and five ILAS Special Sessions. I also look forward to seeing many of you in May at the SIAM Applied Linear Algebra meeting in Paris. ILAS is also a partner at this meeting, with two ILAS plenary speakers. As of January 1st, 2024. Leonardo Robol will take over as ILAS-net manager. If you need to send a message to the ILAS-net, please write to Leonardo at leonardo.robol@unipi.it. I take this opportunity to publicly thank Pietro Paparella, the outgoing ILAS-net manager for his excellent service to ILAS over the last few years. Best wishes, Daniel B. Szyld (he/him/his) ILAS President |
| 2023 December 14 ILAS-NET Message No. 2509 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Renata Del-Vecchio SUBJECT: Special Issue of Special Matrices Special Matrices is pleased to announce a special issue devoted to the Workshop on Spectral Graph Theory in honor of Nair Abreu for her (70+3)rd birthday. We invite submissions based on talks given at the workshop. Other papers not presented at the conference but in connection with the Workshop are welcome as well. Deadline for submissions is 28 February 2024. A pdf-file with submission guidelines can be downloaded by clicking the link: https://www.degruyter.com/publication/journal_key/SPMA/downloadAsset/SPMA_CFP%20WSGT.pdf. Regards, Renata Del-Vecchio |
| 2023 December 11 ILAS-NET Message No. 2508 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Daniel B. Szyld SUBJECT: Results of ILAS Elections Dear ILAS members: Here are the results of the recent elections for ILAS officers for the period March 1, 2024–February 28, 2027. • Secretary Treasurer: Minnie Catral • ILAS Board of Directors: Stefan Güttel and Naomi Shaked-Monderer I look forward to working with them! I publicly thank all the candidates for participating, and all the members who voted this year. Daniel B. Szyld (he/him/his) ILAS President |
| 2023 December 01 ILAS-NET Message No. 2507 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Louis Deaett SUBJECT: Fall issue (71) of ILAS IMAGE now available! As yet another sign that the year is winding down, we have the Fall 2023 issue of IMAGE, your ILAS bulletin. One new feature as of this issue is a list of ongoing online seminars. Follow the links to see what speakers are coming up or maybe find a new seminar that interests you. Meanwhile, the IMAGE Problem Corner has been running for many years. Peruse the clever solutions there, and maybe find yourself inspired to tackle your own problems—or maybe just one of the three that debut in the Problem Corner with this issue! Read an interview with Avi Berman and learn how he promotes the Technion to high-powered U.S. senators. In the linear algebra education section, get inspired to try out mastery-based testing in your linear algebra class by reading about its implementation at the Colorado School of Mines. Try to count the people you know as you squint at the group photos in this past summer's slate of conference reports, and read about some conferences planned for the year ahead. It's all there in issue 71 of IMAGE. Or at least I hope so. Enjoy! https://ilasic.org/wp-content/uploads/IMAGE/image71.pdf Louis Deaett IMAGE Editor-in-Chief |
| 2023 November 29 ILAS-NET Message No. 2506 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Apoorva Khare SUBJECT: Call for Nominations for the 2025 ILAS JMM Lecturer Dear ILAS members: We are soliciting suggestions for the ILAS Lecturer at the 2025 Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM) in Seattle, WA, USA, during 8–11 January 2025. The ILAS JMM Lecturer will represent ILAS via an Invited Address, and could also organize one or more special sessions at the JMM. Please send your suggestions for ILAS JMM Lecturers, along with a short justification and a CV, if possible, to Apoorva Khare (khare@iisc.ac.in) by 22 December 2023. We look forward to hearing from you, and with best regards, Apoorva Khare (on behalf of the ILAS JMM Speaker Committee [Orly Alter, Ángeles Carmona, Mark Embree, and Daniel Szyld]) |
| 2023 November 06 ILAS-NET Message No. 2505 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Minerva Catral SUBJECT: ILAS Election Voting Is Now Open On November 1st, 2023, each current member of ILAS was e-mailed an individual link, username, password and instructions for electronic voting, and voting is open. If the email did not land on your inbox, check your clutter or spam folder for an email with subject: ILAS 2024 Election Ballot. The ballot is self-explanatory, with instructions. You may vote for Secretary/Treasurer (one) and members of the Board of Directors (two) for terms starting March 1, 2024. Biographical information about each candidate can be viewed by clicking a Details button near their name. If you are a member and did not receive an e-mail, please contact Minerva Catral, ILAS Secretary/Treasurer, at catralm@xavier.edu to obtain your username and password. If you have received your instructions but have not yet voted, you may vote any time through 11:59 PM GMT November 30 but it is recommended to vote by November 29 because the election ends at 11:59 PM GMT regardless of the time zone you are in. |
| 2023 November 06 ILAS-NET Message No. 2504 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Daniel B. Szyld SUBJECT: ILAS Members Selected as AMS Fellows It is with great pleasure and pride that I want to congratulate two ILAS members for becoming Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, Class of 2024. They are: Leslie Hogben and Javad Mashreghi In addition, Javad Mashreghi was also recently named Fellow of the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences, class of 2023. Daniel B. Szyld (he/him/his) ILAS President |
| 2023 October 23 ILAS-NET Message No. 2503 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Daniel B. Szyld SUBJECT: Board Approves New Funds for Students Dear ILAS members and friends: At its recent meeting, the ILAS Board of Directors approved two new initiatives with the goal of facilitating Ph.D. students with fewer funding opportunities to attend ILAS Conferences. There will be ten grants of US$700 each for travel expenses of Ph.D. students to attend an ILAS Conference. ILAS is setting aside funds to cover the registration of any deserving Ph.D. student who requests a registration fee waiver. This will be in place for the next two ILAS Conferences, and afterwards the Board will reassess the program. Daniel B. Szyld (he/him/his) ILAS President |
| 2023 October 09 ILAS-NET Message No. 2502 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Ida Tassens SUBJECT: Robert M. Corless Seminar Back to the Roots seminars Seminar 2: Prof. Dr. Robert M. Corless "Bohemian Matrices: An introduction and some open problems" The second seminar in our series for 2023–2024, organized by Prof. Dr. Bart De Moor (KU Leuven, ESAT-STADIUS) and centered around the themes of his ERC project “Back to the roots of data-driven dynamical system identification”, will be delivered by Prof. Dr. Robert M. Corless on Wednesday, 11 October 2023, at 2 pm in the Auditorium of the Arenberg Castle. Everyone is welcome to attend. The presentation will be streamed and can be followed here. The slides and recording of the previous seminar are available on our website. Robert M. Corless Bohemian Matrices: An introduction and some open problems 11 October 2023, 2 pm KU Leuven Aula Arenbergkasteel (01.07) parking code upon request Abstract The name “Bohemian matrices” was proposed for a field that has actually been studied for many years now by different researchers, not recognizing their commonality. The name comes from an acronym for BOunded HEight Matrices, of Integers, although the restriction to integers has been subsequently relaxed. The “height” of a vector is its infinity norm, and the “height” of a matrix A is the infinity norm of vec(A). The word “height” has been commonly used in the context of univariate polynomials expressed in the monomial basis: the height of a polynomial is the infinity norm of the vector of coefficients. We say “characteristic height” for the height of the characteristic polynomial of a matrix A. The idea is to restrict the study to families of matrices all of whose entries come from a finite (and hence bounded) set, called the population. Well-known examples include zero-one or binary matrices, Bernoulli matrices whose entries are either 1 or -1, and sign pattern matrices where the entries can be 1, 0, or -1. One can then study Bohemian families of structured matrices, say upper Hessenberg Toeplitz Bohemian matrices, or complex symmetric tridiagonal Bohemian matrices, or symmetric matrices with entries from a restricted population, or Bohemian companion matrices, or other families. In this talk I will survey some known results, and discuss some problems that remain open. In particular, I will ask for help in finding algorithms to construct “minimal height” companion matrices for polynomials with integer coefficients; such things exist (possibly not uniquely) but there is no known good algorithm for constructing them. I will give examples where the height of the companion matrix is exponentially smaller (in the degree/dimension) than is the characteristic height. This seems interesting because lower height offers the hope of better eigenvalue conditioning. But even that is not well-understood. This is joint work with many people. More information: Dr. Katrien De Cock, ESAT-STADIUS tel: 016 32 17 09 e-mail: katrien.decock@esat.kuleuven.be, bart.demoor@esat.kuleuven.be |
| 2023 September 29 ILAS-NET Message No. 2501 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Daniel B. Szyld SUBJECT: ILAS at the JMM in January (registration open) Dear ILAS members and friends: Registration for the Joint Mathematical Meetings, of which ILAS is a partner, is now open; see https://www.jointmathematicsmeetings.org//jmm. The meeting will take place January 3–6 in San Francisco (and hotel rooms with special rates are going fast). ILAS will have a large presence, and I hope you take advantage of this opportunity to network, to hear the ILAS invited address, and/or participate in many of the ILAS Special Sessions, and the social reception. At the Prize Ceremony, we will present the ILAS speaker Stephan Ramon Garcia with a diploma. I list here the ILAS sessions. ILAS Invited Address Stephan Ramon Garcia, Pomona College, Fast food for thought: what can chicken nuggets tell us about linear algebra? Thursday January 4, 2024, 9:45 a.m.-10:50 a.m. Abstract: A simple question about chicken nuggets connects everything from analysis and combinatorics to probability theory and computer-aided design. Linear algebra is a recurring theme: determinantal formulas, piecewise-polynomial interpolation, random norms', trace polynomials, and operator algebras all make an appearance. This talk is aimed at a general mathematical audience: students are invited to attend! ILAS Special Sessions (and their organizers) ILAS Special Session on Graphs and Matrices Saturday January 6, 2024, 8:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. and 1:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m. Jane Breen, Ontario Tech University Stephen Kirkland, University of Manitoba ILAS Special Session on Generalized Numerical Ranges and Related Topics Wednesday January 3, 2024, 8:00 a.m.–11:30 a.m. and 1:00 p.m.–4:00 p.m. Tin-Yau Tam, University of Nevada, Reno Pan-Shun Lau, University of Nevada, Reno ILAS Special Session on Linear Algebra, Matrix theory, and its Applications Thursday January 4, 2024, 1:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m. and Friday January 5, 2024, 8:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. Stephan Ramon Garcia, Pomona College Konrad Aguilar, Pomona College ILAS Special Session on Sign-pattern Matrices and Their Applications Friday January 5, 2024, 8:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. and 1:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m. Bryan L Shader, University of Wyoming Minerva Catral, Xavier University ILAS Special Session on Spectral and combinatorial problems for nonnegative matrices and their generalizations Saturday January 6, 2024, 8:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. and 1:00 p.m.–4:00 p.m. Pietro Paparella, University of Washington Bothell Michael J. Tsatsomeros, Washington State University ILAS Special Session on Innovative and Effective Ways to Teach Linear Algebra Wednesday January 3, 2024, 9:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. and 2:30 p.m.-4:30 p.m. David M. Strong, Pepperdine University Sepideh Stewart, University of Oklahoma Gil Strang, MIT Megan Wawro, Virginia Tech Daniel B. Szyld (he/him/his) ILAS President |
| 2023 September 27 ILAS-NET Message No. 2500 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Arvind Saibaba SUBJECT: SIAG/LA Prizes This year, there are two major prizes in consideration by the SIAM Activity Group on Linear Algebra 1. SIAM Activity Group on Linear Algebra Best Paper Prize (https://www.siam.org/prizes-recognition/activity-group-prizes/detail/siag-linear-algebra-prize) 2. SIAM Activity Group on Linear Algebra Early Career Prize (https://www.siam.org/prizes-recognition/activity-group-prizes/detail/siag-la-early-career-prize) We would kindly appreciate your nomination(s) of outstanding candidates for these prestigious awards. You can submit a Nomination at https://siam.smapply.org/prog/2024_siam_prize_program/. The deadline is Sunday, October 15, 2023, at 11:59 PM Eastern. Please contact Arvind Saibaba (asaibab@ncsu.edu) or Agnieszka Miedlar (amiedlar@vt.edu) if you have any further questions. |
| 2023 September 26 ILAS-NET Message No. 2499 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Minerva Catral SUBJECT: ILAS Election Announcement Voting in the next ILAS election (for terms starting March 1, 2024) will take place November 1, 2023 through November 30, 2023. Members will be e-mailed their voting instructions on November 1. In order to vote you need to be a current member of ILAS when the election begins. All current ILAS members were sent an email dated September 25 confirming that they will receive a ballot on November 1. ILAS no longer publishes the complete member list on the website. If you are not yet a member, you may sign up at https://ilasic.org/join-ilas/ no later than October 25, 2023 so your membership can be processed before the election begins. If you did not receive an email on September 25 confirming that you will receive a ballot on November 1, and believe you are a member, please email the Secretary/Treasurer Minnie Catral and/or the Assistant Secretary/Treasurer Mike Tait at (ILASsecretarytreasurer@gmail.com). Please state when you joined or last renewed and your type of membership (student, early career, standard, life, or fee waiver). If you have an e-mail confirmation of payment it would help to forward that, but it is not necessary. Receiving ILAS-net messages, including this one, does not imply you are an ILAS member. |
| 2023 September 22 ILAS-NET Message No. 2498 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Daniel B. Szyld SUBJECT: Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize Awarded to Apoorva Khare It is with great pleasure and pride that I share the news that our colleague and ILAS Board of Directors member Professor Apoorva Khare from the Indian Institute of Science, was awarded this year's Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in Mathematical Sciences. This is the highest science prize in India. Congratulations Apoorva!! Daniel B. Szyld (he/him/his) ILAS President |
| 2023 September 13 ILAS-NET Message No. 2497 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Jianlin Xia SUBJECT: Conference on Fast Direct Solvers, Purdue University, Nov 4–5 The Center for Computational & Applied Mathematics (CCAM) at Purdue University will be hosting the 2023 Conference on Fast Direct Solvers on November 4–5, 2023. Please consider to register and please encourage your students/postdocs/collaborators to register. The conference themes include: • Structured matrices and structured direct solvers • Sparsity and data sparsity • Randomized numerical linear algebra • Fast solvers for data analysis and machine learning • Structured preconditioning and FMM solvers • High performance direct solvers and matrix factorizations • Fast PDE and IE solvers • Applications of fast solvers • Other relevant subjects The invited speakers are: • Wei Cai, Southern Methodist University • Edmond Chow, Georgia Institute of Technology • Robert Krasny, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor • Daniel Kressner, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne • Alex Townsend, Cornell University • David Woodruff, Carnegie Mellon University • Yuanzhe Xi, Emory University Contributed talks are welcome. Registration is free but is required. More details may be found from the conference webpage: https://www.math.purdue.edu/~xiaj/FastSolvers2023/ |
| 2023 September 07 ILAS-NET Message No. 2496 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Daniel B. Szyld SUBJECT: ILAS Lectures at Non-ILAS Conferences and General Support As part of ILAS's commitment to supporting activities in Linear Algebra, the Society maintains a program of providing some support to non-ILAS conferences. This financial support may take one of two forms (a conference may apply for only one of these two forms). • ILAS Lectureships at non-ILAS conferences. It is expected that ILAS lecturers will be of the stature of plenary speakers at ILAS conferences and may be supported by up to US\$1000 for expenses, or in the case of a Hans Schneider Lecturer, US\$1500. Reimbursement guidelines may be obtained from the Secretary/Treasurer. • General support of conferences of up to US$750. Such support could be used for support of student expenses, expenses for participants from developing countries, or plenary speakers. Refreshment costs are not eligible. You are welcome to consult the President of ILAS about what you may propose. This is a reminder that there is a deadline of 30 September 2023 for receipt of proposals for sponsorship of ILAS Lectures at non-ILAS meetings and for general support of conferences taking place in 2024. Please note that we will not be able to consider applications submitted after the deadline as it is important to rank all applications in one go. Each proposal is automatically assumed to be also a request for the ILAS endorsement of the conference. A statement whether the conference will adhere to the ILAS Welcoming and Inclusiveness Statement should be included in the proposal. Further details on the guidelines for proposals can be found at the following link: https://ilasic.org/non-ilas-guidelines/. (Note that the guidelines have been changed from previous years.) In addition, ILAS may endorse a Non-ILAS conference, without financial support. Such endorsed meetings can list ILAS' endorsement on their website, and in turn, the conferences are listed on the website of ILAS-Endorsed Meetings: https://ilasic.org/conferences/#ilas-endorsed-meetings. (Note that the guidelines have been changed from previous years.) Daniel B. Szyld (he/him/his) ILAS President |
| 2023 August 30 ILAS-NET Message No. 2495 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Vilmar Trevison SUBJECT: WSGT special issue on Special Matrices We are pleased to announce a special issue for the WSGT 2023 In honor of Nair Abreu for her (70+3)rd birthday. The Workshop will take place October 24-27th, 2023 (http://spectralgraphtheory.org/ ). The journal Special Matrices will dedicate a special issue to Nair Abreu on the occasion. The submissions are open until February 28, 2024. We invite submissions based on talks given at the workshop. Other papers not presented at the conference but in connection with the Workshop are welcome as well. More information on the link https://www.editorialmanager.com/spma/default2.aspx. |
| 2023 August 24 ILAS-NET Message No. 2494 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Biswa Nath Datta SUBJECT: C. R. Rao (1920–2023) It is with great sadness that I announce that the legendary statistician, Professor C. R. Rao, passed away at the age of 102. Professor Rao made numerous outstanding and everlasting contributions to statistics and mathematical statistics. Among some of the most well-known results include the "Rao-Blackwell Theorem" and "Theory of Generalized Inverse of a Matrix" (with Professor S. K. Mitra). He received many highly prestigious awards, the most notable of which include the "2023 International Prize in Statistics", which is equivalent to Nobel Prize in the Field, and the "US National Medal of Science Award" in 2002. His work influenced many other areas of science, economics, genetics, and medicine. He is also well-known to the Linear Algebra Community. In fact, I first met Professor Rao in the early eighties at an Applied Linear Algebra Conference at Raleigh, North Carolina. He subsequently visited NIU on my invitation. His visit was a pride to the whole scientific community at NIU. Every moment I spent with him during that visit was remarkable and priceless. Since then we communicated several times on topics related to linear-algebra problems in statistics and on his book "Matrix Algebra and its Applications to Statistics and Econometrics" (with Professor M. Bhaskar Rao) was published in 1998. His death indeed is indeed a great loss to the world scientific community. |
| 2023 August 23 ILAS-NET Message No. 2493 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Jephian C.-H. Lin SUBJECT: Conference Announcements and Reports in IMAGE Dear ILAS members: IMAGE—the bulletin of ILAS—will release its next issue in December. If you are organizing or organized an event, you are encouraged to submit the announcement or the report for it, and we would be happy to include them in the "Upcoming Conferences and Workshops" or the "Conference Reports" sections of IMAGE. If you are interested in doing so, please send your announcement/report to jephianlin [at] gmail [dot] com by October 15. And please feel free to let me know if you have any questions through the same email address. Many thanks, Jephian C.-H. Lin Conference Editor of ILAS IMAGE |
| 2023 August 18 ILAS-NET Message No. 2492 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Hermie Monterde SUBJECT: Invitation to Attend 05C50 Online Dear ILAS members: Good day! I hope this email finds you well. I am Hermie Monterde, a PhD student from the University of Manitoba. My supervisor, Dr. Steve Kirkland, and I cordially invite you to attend 05C50 Online, an online international seminar that aims to showcase current research trends in Graphs and Matrices and make them accessible globally. 05C50 refers to the Mathematical Reviews classification number for Graphs and Linear Algebra. This seminar will run once every two weeks on a Friday, 10 am to 11 am Central Time starting with a talk on September 8 by Bryan Shader (US), followed by talks from Sasmita Barik (India) on September 22 and Thomás Jung Spier (Brazil) on October 6. To subscribe and receive zoom links for this seminar, please fill out the following form: https://forms.gle/h4kgVGL1Wo9L9mXE6. If you are already subscribed to the seminar, then there is no need to fill out the form again. For more information, please visit our website: https://sites.google.com/view/05c50online/home. If you have inquiries about the seminar, then please contact Hermie Monterde. Thank you and hope to see you there! 🙂 Best, Hermie Monterde (she/her) monterdh@myumanitoba.ca |
| 2023 August 07 ILAS-NET Message No. 2491 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Pan Shun Lau and Tin-Yau Tam SUBJECT: 2023 Fall Biweekly Matrix Seminar on Zoom at UNR The 2023 Fall Biweekly Matrix Seminar at the University of Nevada, Reno, USA will be held via Zoom from 4:15 pm–5:15 pm on Fridays (US Pacific Time). All are welcome to join. The first talk will be on September 1, 2023. For talk schedule see https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MswSd16JqsZE294kYCXujLio4cnAiuYv6QKRc6BxvI0/edit# and the Zoom link is https://unr.zoom.us/j/86055963826. Please contact Pan Shun Lau at plau@unr.edu if you have any questions. Best regards, Pan Shun Lau and Tin-Yau Tam |
| 2023 July 04 ILAS-NET Message No. 2490 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Daniel B. Szyld SUBJECT: Nominations sought for ILAS Board Members and Secretary-Treasurer Dear ILAS members: Later in the Fall, we will hold the annual elections. We will vote to fill two slots at the ILAS Board of Directors. These two slots are being vacated by Melina Freitag and Apoorva Khare, whose terms are ending. Continuing members are Paola Boito, Chi-Kwong Li, Lek-Heng Lim, and Fernando De Terán. In addition, we will vote for the position of Secretary-Treasurer since Minnie Catral's term also ends. The continuing Executive Board members are Froilán Dopico (Vice-President), Raf Vandebril (second Vice-President for Conferences), Michael Tait (Assistant Secretary-Treasurer), and myself. I am writing to ask you to consider suggesting the name of a colleague (or yourself) to run for the election. Such suggestions should be sent by Friday July 21 to Beatrice Meini (beatrice dot meini at unipi dot it) who is the chair of the Nominating Committee for this year. The other members of the 2023 Nominating Committee are Leslie Hogben, Helena Šmigoc, Tin-Yau Tam, and Hugo Woerdeman. I take this opportunity to thank the committee for their service to ILAS. A list of former ILAS Board members can be found at: https://ilasic.org/past-ilas-officers/ Daniel B. Szyld (he/him/his) ILAS President |
| 2023 June 30 ILAS-NET Message No. 2489 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Claudia Justel SUBJECT: New Submission Deadline—Workshop on Spectral Graph Theory 2023 The deadline for submission of abstracts was extended to 15-Jul-2023:. For complete details, follow the link below: http://spectralgraphtheory.org/submissions/ |
| 2023 June 30 ILAS-NET Message No. 2488 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Froilán Dopico SUBJECT: Minutes of the 2023 ILAS Business Meeting 2023 ILAS BUSINESS MEETING Wednesday June 14, 2023 Salón de actos of “Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Forestal” Universidad Politécnica de Madrid Madrid, Spain Agenda: A. Reading of Notice of Meeting. B. Review of the Minutes of Previous Meeting. C. Report of President and Vice President. D. Report of Secretary/Treasurer. E. Reports of Committees. i) Education Committee (chair: Sepideh Stewart) ii) Outreach and Membership Committee (chair: Shahla Nasserasr) iii) Journals Committee (chair: Heike Fassbender) iv) Electronic Journal of Linear Algebra (Editor: Froilán Dopico) v) IMAGE (Editor: Louis Deaett) F. Transaction of other Business. i) Future ILAS Confernces (Jephian C.-H. Lin) ii) Any other business G. Adjournment. President Szyld called the meeting to order at 17:04 CEST. Vice-President Dopico observed that about 44 ILAS members were in attendance and that the quorum was met, as stated by ILAS Bylaws. A. Reading of Notice of Meeting President Szyld read the notice of the meeting. B. Review of the minutes of previous meeting President Szyld noted that in re-reading the minutes of last year’s business meeting held in Galway, he came across the item about the ILAS Wikipedia page. President Szyld expanded on that comment with some historical perspective and reported that as noted in previous meetings and documents, the ILAS Board of Directors approved the initiative of making sure ILAS has an appropriate Wikipedia page, after an initiative of then-President Peter Šemrl. Wayne Barrett was the chief author of the first version and Kevin Vander Meulen set it up on Wikipedia. Then-Vice-President Hugo Woerdeman updated the page periodically. After that, the Outreach and Membership Committee together with Vice-President Froilán Dopico continue to maintain it. President Szyld thanked all the ILAS members mentioned in the previous paragraph for their efforts to add visibility to the Society and said that it was also a good moment to acknowledge other people who had contributed to make the Society work. Sarah Carnochan Naqvi was in charge of the ILAS-NET and the ILAS Website for over a decade. President Szyld called for a round of applause to honor her. Similarly, Panos Psarrakos was for almost fifteen years in charge of the copy-editing of the papers of the Electronic Journal of Linear Algebra (ELA), the flagship research journal of the Society. President Szyld called for another round of applause to honor him. Then, President Szyld acknowledged the contributions of David Watkins, Beatrice Meini and James Nagy who chaired the Outreach and Membership, Journals and Advisory committees, respectively, for the last three years and who recently rotated off those positions. President Szyld initiated a round of applause in recognition of these ILAS members. Without further comments the minutes of the 2022 Business Meeting held in Galway (Ireland) on June 23, 2022, were approved. C. Report of President and Vice President President Szyld emphasized that the state of the Society is good, that the ILAS 2023 conference was proceeding very well and thanked the local organizers of the conference very much, Fernando De Terán, Ana Luzón, Roberto Canogar and the other members of the organizing committee. President Szyld reported that a new ILAS initiative in 2023 of which the Society is very proud of is the Childcare Grant Program for members who are parents of young children. The other highlight of the year has been the first in person participation of ILAS in the 2023 Joint Mathematics Meeting (JMM). President Szyld informed the members that they would hear about ELA later and encouraged the attendees to submit research papers to ELA. He also mentioned that a report on IMAGE, the semi-annual bulletin for ILAS containing essays related to linear algebra activities, would be presented later during the meeting, and encouraged the attendees to contribute to IMAGE with articles of general interest. President Szyld recalled that ILAS collaborates with SIAM at its conferences on Applied Linear Algebra and announced that the next SIAM Conference on Applied Linear Algebra will be held in Paris (France) on May 13-17, 2024. He also announced that the next ILAS Conference will be held in Kaohsiung, Taiwan on June 23-27, 2025 and that more information about this conference would be presented later during the meeting. Lastly, President Szyld announced that the ILAS Board of Directors in the meeting held the day before (June 13) had approved a decision to remove the individual ILAS members list from the ILAS website. This decision was made in part to comply with the European Union regulation about protection of personal data. D. Report of Secretary/Treasurer Treasurer Catral briefly presented the ILAS 2022–2023 Treasurer’s Report, which had been already published in the issue 70 of IMAGE. She remarked that ILAS is in good financial state with a balance of $ 287,901.47 on March 31, 2023. E. Reports of Committees i. Education Committee Sepideh Stewart reported that the Education Committee is composed of Anthony Cronin, Judi McDonald, Rachel Quinlan, Sepideh Stewart (Chair), and David Strong. This ILAS Education Committee was appointed and formed in February 2021 and was re-appointed in March 2023 after the second term of Daniel Szyld as president started. Sepideh Stewart continued by reporting on the ILAS Education Webpages. The Education Committee organized the ILAS Monthly Seminars. In Fall 2022, the committed hosted three seminars via Zoom: (Matrix) Zeros of Polynomials (Damjan Kobal), The Marvelous Minimal Polynomial (Sheldon Axler), and Distance between Vectors and Big Data (Maribel Bueno Cachadiña). A link to the recorded seminars and slides was posted on the ILAS Education Webpages. Although the talks were highly engaging, Sepideh Stewart reported that the attendance at these seminars was lower than anticipated. Therefore, starting in Spring 2023, the Monthly Seminars were replaced by Monthly Video Podcasts. The Committee had posted four Podcasts on the ILAS Education Webpages. The topics were: Linear Algebra Applications for the Modern World (Mike Michalidis), A Linear Algebraic Model used in Statistical Regression (Wayne Stewart), Applications of Linear Algebra to Graph Theory and Network Science (Daryl DeFord) and Building Fourier and Functional Analysis Learning Trajectories for Engineering Mathematics Education (Celil Ekici). Those persons who would like to give a talk were encouraged to contact Judi McDonald. The Education Committee is currently working on Lesson Plans for Teaching Linear Algebra to be posted in a new ILAS Education Webpage. At the time of the meeting the committee was focused on creating lesson plans for teaching linear algebra concepts (at all levels). Sepideh Stewart explained that a lesson plan is a scholarly manuscript consisting of mathematical ideas, examples, tasks, and the teacher’s thought processes on teaching a specific linear algebra topic. The committee was in the process of establishing an Editorial Board to manage the lesson plans. Sepideh Stewart emphasized that the success of these resources for teaching depends on the ILAS members’ contributions. She encouraged the community to write lesson plans and share their ideas and thoughts about teaching various topics. Creating and preserving a record of teaching ideas and experiences will benefit the international linear algebra community and our students. Those persons who would like to submit a lesson plan were encouraged to contact Rachel Quinlan. Next, Sepideh Stewart reported on different publications related to the Education Committee. During the past year, the Committee had two IMAGE education articles. Those persons who would like to contribute a short article were encouraged to contact Anthony Cronin, the IMAGE education editor. The Education Committee proposal for a special issue entitled “Linear Algebra Education: An International Perspective” in the journal “Problems, Resources, and Issues in Mathematics Undergraduate Studies” (PRIMUS) was accepted by the editors of the journal on June 24, 2022. Established in 1991, PRIMUS is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering the teaching of undergraduate mathematics. The call for papers was due in February 2023. The Education Committee received 25 papers, and at the time of the meeting, 19 papers were under review. The ILAS education committee members were acting as guest editors of this special issue of PRIMUS. Lastly, Sepideh Stewart reported on Conferences and Workshops organized by the Education Committee. The committee organized two ILAS Special Sessions at the 2023 Joint Mathematical Meetings (JMM) on Innovative and Effective Ways to Teach Linear Algebra. Ten speakers presented contributions, and both sessions were well attended. Those persons who would like to give an educational talk at a future JMM were encouraged to contact David Strong. The Committee also organized an ILAS Education Workshop 2023 on June 11, 2023, i.e., the day before the ILAS 2023 Conference started, and an ILAS Education Mini-Symposium in the ILAS 2023 Conference with 12 talks during the education sessions. Sepideh Stewart concluded by emphasizing that the committee focuses on ILAS and its goals and looks forward to serving the ILAS community in the coming year. The Education Committee activities can be seen at https://la-education.oucreate.com/. ii. Outreach and Membership Committee Shahla Nasserasr reported that the Outreach and Membership Committee is composed of Minerva Catral, Andrii Dmytryshyn, Federico Poloni, and Shahla Nasserasr (Chair). This Committee was appointed in March 2023 after the second term of Daniel Szyld as president started. Next, Shahla Nasserasr reported on the following issues. 1- A Qualtrics questionnaire has been created by the committee and will be sent to the ILAS Members for collecting demographic and professional information about the ILAS Membership. 2- The ILAS Corporate sponsors are Birkhauser/Springer, Elsevier Science Inc., Taylor & Francis Group - Informa UK Ltd, MathWorks, World Scientific Publishing Co., and Maplesoft. 3- The Committee maintains the Wikipedia pages for ILAS and ELA in a joint effort with other committees and individuals. 4- The Committee handles the social media presence of ILAS in Facebook and Twitter. Shahla Nasserasr concluded her report by asking the attendees to encourage their students to join ILAS (for free). iii. Journals Committee Heike Fassbender reported that a new Journals Committee (JC) had been appointed in late April 2023 and that it is composed of Louis Deaett (for IMAGE), Froilán Dopico (for ELA), Zlatko Drmac, Shaun Fallat, Heike Fassbender (Chair), and Daniel Szyld (as ILAS president). The new chair had met with the previous chair (Beatrice Meini) to discuss the handover of tasks. The previous JC met online in October 2022 to discuss the annual report of ELA and IMAGE. The main action concerning ELA was the proposal of 4 new associate editors starting in 2023. In the course of implementing the new ILAS bylaws related to membership and service terms for ELA’s Editorial Board approved on April 2, 2021, the terms of quite a number of ELA editors will end in 2023. The new JC will discuss proposals for new editors with the ELA Editor-in-Chief (EiC) Froilán Dopico in September-October 2023. The main action concerning IMAGE was a discussion on how to improve the IMAGE website and the discoverability of IMAGE content. iv. Report on the Electronic Journal of Linear Algebra The EiC of ELA, Froilán Dopico, stated that ELA’s primary goals are to publish high-quality papers that support and catalyze linear algebra research and to reach prompt decisions on submissions. The EiC remarked that the Editorial Board’s efforts to raise the quality of papers that appear in ELA continue, as are the efforts to speed up the handling of submissions. Next the EiC reported on the following data of the year 2022: · ELA received 262 new submissions of which: 6 were still under review (as of 06/11/2023), 45 were already accepted or published, 192 were rejected outright, i.e., without sending them to reviewers, by the EIC (often in collaboration with Advisory and Associate Editors) or directly by some Editors (after discussion with the EiC), and 25 were rejected after review. · This amounts to a 73.3 % of outright rejections and 82.8 % of total rejections. · These data are like those of 2021. The EiC presented detailed data on rankings and impact factors taken from the Journal Citations Reports (JCR)-Clarivate (2021 edition) on ELA and, for the sake of comparison, on other linear algebra related journals. These journals were LAA, LAMA, SIMAX and Operators & Matrices. The EiC concluded from these and other data that ELA is ranked at a higher level than Operators & Matrices and Special Matrices, and clearly below SIMAX, LAMA and LAA. With respect to the evolution of ELA’s Impact Factor, the EiC emphasized that a clear improvement had been observed since 2017 with respect to the four previous years (2013-16). Except for the year 2017, ELA has been ranked in the third quartile (Q3) in the category Mathematics of JCR since 2013. ELA’s percentile in that category improved the last year and ELA was close to be in Q2 at the time of the business meeting. An effort is needed to improve the quartile of ELA, which is very relevant to several evaluation procedures in Europe. It would be desirable to reach a level closer to LAA and LAMA in terms of impact factor and percentile, since these two journals have very similar scopes to ELA. The EiC emphasized that the key for improving the quality and reputation of ELA is to attract a greater participation in the content of ELA by ILAS members, since this participation is currently very limited. The EiC strongly encouraged the people in the audience to submit good papers to ELA since it is the research journal of ILAS. Finally, the EiC sincerely thanked all the editors of ELA, all the referees of ELA, all the authors of ELA, and the librarians of the University of Wyoming (hosting ELA) for making ELA possible. v. Report on IMAGE The EiC of IMAGE, Louis Deaett, reported on IMAGE activities in the past year, including the Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 issues. Web site analytics suggest that readership in both the Fall and Spring issues increased substantially year-over-year. Many of the organizational priorities for IMAGE carry over from the previous year. Most importantly, IMAGE is actively working to fill the vacant editorial positions responsible for feature articles and book reviews, and one new such position, responsible for news items. One new plan is to enhance the news items in IMAGE with the goal of aggregating more "local" awards and accomplishments of ILAS members. Another is to enhance the conferences section by including a digest of ongoing online seminars, as well as special sessions occurring at conferences not specifically devoted to linear algebra. Another near-term initiative is to include more information in the IMAGE portion of the ILAS web site. For example, an index of interviews that have appeared in IMAGE should be posted there soon. F. Transaction of other Business i. Future ILAS meetings Jephian C.-H. Lin reported that the 26th Conference of the International Linear Algebra Society will be held in 2025 in the charming city of Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Jephian C.-H. Lin, on behalf of the local organizing committee, was delighted to invite all the participants in the Business Meeting and in the 25th ILAS Conference in Madrid to join them in Kaohsiung, benefiting from Taiwan's reputation for safety, breathtaking views, and convenience. Jephian C.-H. Lin announced that the proposed conference venue offers excellent accessibility through public transportation and provides a magnificent harbor view, adding to the overall appeal. Moreover, Taiwan's welcoming atmosphere extends to many countries enjoying the visa-exempt program, making travel hassle-free. To stay updated, Jephian C.-H. Lin invited the attendees to visit the official website of the conference at https://ilas2025.tw/ and emphasized that the organizers eagerly await the presence of the ILAS community at the conference in 2025. ii. Any other business President Szyld asked if somebody wanted to discuss any other issue. Several ILAS members asked about what ILAS plans to do with the current funds of the Society and suggested, among others, the following potential new initiatives: · to invest in programs for improving the equity and diversity, · to establish new and more ambitious grant programs for making it easier that students participate in ILAS conferences, · to establish PhD or post-doc fellowships and · to organize summer schools for attracting young people to the field of Linear Algebra. President Szyld answered by emphasizing in the first place that both the Executive Board and the Board of Directors of ILAS are open to new ideas and initiatives and that the suggestions listed in the previous paragraph will be discussed by the Board of Directors. In particular, President Szyld mentioned that the idea of organizing summer schools on trending topics in Linear Algebra and its applications is already under development and had been already discussed in the Board of Directors Meetings. Moreover, President Szyld recalled some of the initiatives that have been adopted in the past few years and that are currently working as, for instance, · the “ILAS Welcoming and Inclusiveness Statement” https://ilasic.org/inclusiveness-statement/, and the fact that ILAS requires that every ILAS Conference or every Conference endorsed by ILAS has a similar statement, · the Childcare grants that ILAS is providing to ILAS members who are parents of young children so as to make it easier to attend an ILAS Conference, · new points in the ILAS Guidelines for organizing ILAS Conferences that will make easier to parents of young children to attend, · the ILAS Grant Program in support of Mathematicians working in Linear Algebra affected by conflicts, · the LAA Early Career Speakers program funded through generous donations by Elsevier and · the appointment of an Investment Committee for taking care of the ILAS funds On the other hand, President Szyld remarked that ILAS is a small society and that the current funds are not large, although they may seem a significant amount from the perspective of one person. Therefore, ILAS must be careful and conservative in the administration of its funds. President Szyld also answered a couple of concrete questions asked by two ILAS Members. Thus, he explained the origins of the Taylor & Francis Donation and the corresponding LAMA Fund. President Szyld explained that Taylor & Francis had funded since 2005 the LAMA Lecture at each ILAS Conference and that to ask Taylor & Francis for the funds every time an ILAS Conference was held was time consuming. Thus, Steve Kirkland had the idea of asking Taylor & Francis for a reasonable amount of money whose interests would allow ILAS to fund the LAMA Lectures for the years to come. President Szyld also explained that the participation of ILAS at the JMM is funded by ILAS via a signed agreement between ILAS and AMS. G. Adjournment President Szyld thanked all the ILAS Officers for their great work for the Society. President Szyld adjourned the meeting at 17:56 CEST Respectfully submitted by Froilán Dopico, Vice-President of ILAS. |
| 2023 June 28 ILAS-NET Message No. 2487 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Carlos Fonseca SUBJECT: Special Issue for Frank J. Hall Special Matrices is celebrating Frank J. Hall's contributions to matrix theory over the past 4 decades. All contributions in the areas of matrix theory in which Frank has made significant impact, such as generalized inverses, combinatorial matrix theory, integer matrices, sign pattern matrices, nonnegative matrices, consimilarity, spectral graph theory, and Gersgorin theory are welcome. The guest editors are: • Zhongshan Li, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA, • Fuzhen Zhang, Nova Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA • Tin-Yau Tam, University of Nevada, Reno, NV, USA • Bryan Shader, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, USA • Marina Arav, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA • Hein van der Holst, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA For submissions, please, follow the link https://www.editorialmanager.com/spma and choose "Special Issue - Frank Hall". The submission deadline is December 20th, 2023. Special Matrices is indexed in SCOPUS, Web of Science - Clarivate, MATHSCINET, zbMATH, and other major databases. In addition, Special Matrices was awarded with the DOAJ Seal certifying its high publishing standards. |
| 2023 June 06 ILAS-NET Message No. 2486 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Sepideh Stewart SUBJECT: ILAS Education Workshop—June 11, 2023—Madrid A reminder that there will be an ILAS Education Workshop [https://la-education.oucreate.com/conferences-and-workshops/ilas-education-workshop/] on Sunday afternoon (before the start of the ILAS conference), on June 11th, 2023, in Madrid from 3–5:30 pm, with the venue in one of the students' dormitories of Universidad Complutense de Madrid. The address: Colegio Mayor Antonio de Nebrija (Salón de Actos) Av. de Séneca, 8, 28040 Madrid The purpose of the workshop will be to engage in discussing and building a library of lesson plans for teaching linear algebra. To read more about the idea of a Lesson Plan, see IMAGE 69. We envisage participants working in small groups to devise new or share existing lesson plans on teaching specific linear algebra topics of their choosing. These can be elementary topics or content from an upper-division undergraduate or graduate linear algebra course. Please enter your name and information by June 9th, 2023, into the Google form if you hope to attend. This workshop will be free for all conference participants. You are welcome and encouraged to share your experiences and ideas on teaching linear algebra. Sepideh Stewart (ILAS Education Committee Chair) |
| 2023 June 05 ILAS-NET Message No. 2485 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Claudia Justel SUBJECT: 2nd Call for Papers: WSGT 2023—Nair Abreu (70+3)rd birthday The Brazilian community in Spectral Graph Theory is very pleased to announce that the Workshop on Spectral Graph Theory 2023, in honor of Nair Abreu for her (70+3)rd birthday, will be held at Universidade Federal Fluminense in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from October 24 to 27, 2023. The aim of this workshop is to bring together young and experienced researchers in subjects related to spectral graph theory and its applications. The official language of the event is English. Those interested in presenting their work should submit a 1 page abstract (see the template). The abstract submission deadline is June, 30th. Accepted abstracts will be announced by July, 15th. For an accepted abstract to be included in the final program, the presenting author is required to pay the registration fee by August, 10th. For more information, please access http://spectralgraphtheory.org/ or feel free to contact us by e-mail at wspectralgraphtheory@gmail.com. |
| 2023 June 02 ILAS-NET Message No. 2484 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Louis Deaett SUBJECT: Issue 70 of IMAGE—the ILAS bulletin—now available! The Spring 2023 issue of IMAGE, your ILAS bulletin, is now available to peruse online. Enjoy a wide-ranging and inspirational interview with Rajendra Bhatia conducted by Apoorva Khare. Learn about the successful initiative at BYU to integrate labs using Python into linear algebra courses at all levels in our Education article written by Emily J. Evans. Read a report on the first in-person JMM to gather ILAS members and other devotees of linear algebra in Boston, and take a look at the rich slate of conferences coming up in the months ahead. As it is the Spring issue, you are also welcome to scrutinize the ILAS balance sheet and read the full report from our President and Vice President on all the varied activities of ILAS this past year. And, finally, see if you have the inspiration to crack any of the three fresh new puzzles in the Problem Corner! Find all of that and more in IMAGE 70: https://ilasic.org/wp-content/uploads/IMAGE/image70.pdf. |
| 2023 May 26 ILAS-NET Message No. 2483 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Froilán Dopico SUBJECT: ILAS 2023 Business Meeting at Madrid Conference Dear ILAS Members: You are hereby invited to attend the 2023 ILAS BUSINESS MEETING Wednesday June 14, 2023, 17:00-18:00 Salón de Actos of "Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Forestal" (same room of the plenary talks) Campus Ciudad Universitaria Madrid, Spain Agenda: A. Reading of Notice of Meeting. B. Review of the Minutes of Previous Meeting. C. Report of President and Vice President. D. Report of Secretary/Treasurer. E. Reports of Committees. i) Education Committee (chair: Sepideh Stewart) ii) Outreach and Membership Committee (chair: Shahla Nasserasr) iii) Journals Committee (chair: Heike Fassbender) iv) Electronic Journal of Linear Algebra (Editor: Froilán Dopico) v) IMAGE (Editor: Louis Deaett) F. Transaction of Other Business. i) Future ILAS Conferences (Jephian Lin) ii) Any other business G. Adjournment. Below are the minutes of the 2022 Business Meeting 2022 ILAS BUSINESS MEETING Thursday June 23, 2022 O'Flaherty Lecture Theatre Campus of the National University of Ireland Galway, Ireland Agenda: A. Reading of Notice of Meeting. B. Review of the Minutes of Previous Meeting. C. Report of President and Vice President. D. Report of Secretary/Treasurer. E. Reports of Committees. i) Education Committee (chair: Sepideh Stewart) ii) Outreach and Membership Committee (chair: David Watkins replaced in the meeting by Andrii Dmytryshyn) iii) Journals Committee (chair: Beatrice Meini replaced in the meeting by Froilán Dopico) iv) Electronic Journal of Linear Algebra (Editor: Froilán Dopico) v) IMAGE (Editor: Louis Deaett) F. Transaction of Other Business. i) Future ILAS meetings ii) Any other business G. Adjournment. President Szyld called the meeting to order at 17:00 GMT+1. Vice-President Dopico observed that about 38 ILAS members were in attendance and that the quorum was met, as stated by ILAS Bylaws. A. Reading of Notice of Meeting President Szyld read the notice of the meeting. B. Review of the minutes of previous meeting Minutes of the 2021 Business Meeting held virtually on Friday May 14, 2021, were approved. C. Report of President and Vice President President Szyld started by reporting that the state of ILAS is strong and that this statement would be supported by the reports of the different committees that will be presented during the meeting. President Szyld reminded that the detailed annual report prepared by Vice-President Dopico and President Szyld was published in the last issue of IMAGE, the biannual bulletin of ILAS, with Louis Deaett as Editor-in-Chief. President Szyld emphasized that 2022 is the third year of his presidency of ILAS, but that the 24th ILAS Conference in Galway is the first in-person conference since he is serving as president. Therefore, President Szyld reported on the following few highlights from the last three years, all of which came, according to President Szyld, from the excellent work made by the Board of Directors and other members of the society. 1- An agreement with the American Mathematical Society was established so that ILAS is a partner with full participation at the Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM) held every January. In each JMM, ILAS has a plenary speaker and several minisymposia identified with the acronym ILAS. At the next JMM, which will take place in Boston in January 4-7, 2023, the ILAS member Apoorva Khare (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore) will deliver the ILAS plenary lecture and several minisymposia organized by ILAS members have been approved by the ILAS Vice-President for Conferences Raf Vandebril. President Szyld encouraged the ILAS members to start thinking on proposing minisymposia for the 2024 JMM. 2- The Board of Directors approved the “ILAS Welcoming and Inclusiveness Statement”, which can be found at ILAS Web-site, and could be read in the back of the conference schedule. 3- The Board approved the new “ILAS Grant Program in support of Mathematicians working in Linear Algebra affected by conflicts”, a program of small grants for mathematicians working in linear algebra who are refugees or are fleeing situations of conflict. 4- The society established the ILAS Richard A. Brualdi Early Career Prize, which completes and complements the ILAS set of research prizes. The first ILAS Richard A. Brualdi Prize will be awarded in June 2023 at the 25th ILAS Conference to be held in Madrid. President Szyld reported that the committee for the first prize has been appointed and that the members are Shmuel Friedland (Chair), Marina Arav, and Volker Mehrmann. President Szyld encouraged to read the guidelines of the prize at ILAS Web-site and to nominate strong candidates. 5- President Szyld reported that like every year there will be elections in 2023 and that the nominating committee has been set up with the following members: Raymond Chan, Steve Kirkland (Chair), Beatrice Meini, Bryan Shader and Helena Smigoc. 6- The Board of Directors has approved at its meeting on Tuesday June 21 the membership fees for the next year: For standard members the fee continues to be \$40; for Early career members (within 5 years after the PhD) it is \$20, which represents a 50% discount. In both cases, the fees can be waived annually for people undergoing financial hardship upon request. Students have free membership. D. Report of Secretary/Treasurer Treasurer Catral briefly presented the Treasurer’s Report, which was published in IMAGE 68. She remarked that ILAS is in good financial state with a balance of ~220K on March 31, 2022. Treasurer Catral highlighted the generous donation of 60K received recently from Taylor & Francis, the publisher of LAMA, and that was negotiated by Steve Kirkland. Michael Tsatsomeros asked for the reasons of the donation from Taylor & Francis. President Szyld explained that Taylor & Francis had funded since 2005 the LAMA Lecture at each ILAS Conference and that to ask Taylor & Francis for the funds every time an ILAS Conference was held was time consuming. Thus, Steve Kirkland had the idea of asking Taylor & Francis for a reasonable amount of money whose interests would allow ILAS to fund the LAMA Lectures for the years to come. E. Reports of Committees. i. Education Committee The Education Committee is composed of Anthony Cronin (Ireland), Judi McDonald (USA), Rachel Quinlan (Ireland), Sepideh Stewart (Chair) (USA), and David Strong (USA). The new ILAS Education Committee was appointed and formed in February 2021 and meets monthly. Sepideh Stewart started by reporting on the ILAS-Education Webpages. A proposal for having ILAS-Education Webpages inside the ILAS Web site was accepted by the Executive Board of ILAS. A new Education page was launched in Fall 2021 on the ILAS website. Currently, the only active tab is for Seminars, Conferences, and Workshops, to hold the Monthly Seminars via Zoom. The talks of these seminars are recorded, and links to the recorded seminars and slides are posted on the site. So far, the Education Committee has organized nine seminars. Although the talks have been highly engaging, the attendance at these seminars is lower than anticipated. Sepideh Stewart encouraged the ILAS community to participate in these seminars and contact the committee if some person would like to give a talk. Sepideh Stewart reported that the next ILAS-Education page under construction is “Teacher’s Resources”. The members of the Education Committee are focusing on creating Lesson Plans for teaching linear algebra concepts (at all levels). The success of this page depends on the ILAS communities’ contributions. Sepideh Stewart encouraged the community to write lesson plans and share their ideas and thoughts about teaching various topics. Creating and preserving a record of teaching ideas and experiences will benefit the entire international community of linear algebra. The Education Committee hopes to make this page available this coming Fall. More information will be available soon. Next, Sepideh Stewart reported on education publications. During the past year, IMAGE published three education articles. Anthony Cronin is the education editor of IMAGE. Sepideh Stewart encouraged the ILAS Community to approach him if some person would like to contribute an article. The Education Commitee submitted a proposal to PRIMUS in early June, and it got accepted on June 24, 2022 (one day after this business meeting was held). Established in 1991, Problems, Resources, and Issues in Mathematics Undergraduate Studies (PRIMUS) is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering the teaching of undergraduate mathematics. The members of the Education Committee will act as the guest editors of a special issue of PRIMUS. The Committee will send a call and invite ILAS members to submit linear algebra education papers soon. Sepideh Stewart reported that after hearing Helena Smigoc’s seminar on Modern Linear Algebra Applications, in Spring 2022, the Education Committee met monthly to plan the writing of a Modern Applied Linear Algebra book. The Committee would like to invite all ILAS members to join in with this initiative and send their ideas to the Committee. Sepideh Stewart informed on Conferences as follows. The Education Committee had three sessions (12 talks) at this year’s ILAS conference. The Education Committee organized two sessions in SIAM/LA21 titled Linear Algebra Education for the Modern World (May 17 &18, 2021). These were well attended, and good discussions took place. Sepideh Stewart, Judi McDonald, and Anthony Cronin organized a Linear Algebra Workshop at the Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education Conference in Boston, USA (February 2022). Judi McDonald and Anthony Cronin discussed parts of their research in linear algebra. For upcoming Conferences, the Committee plans to organize a JMM 2023 – ILAS Education session, and a possible ILAS Education Workshop at the ILAS conference 2023. Sepideh Stewart finished her report by emphasizing that the Education Committee is dedicated to focusing on ILAS and its goals and finding ways of serving the ILAS community. ii. Outreach and Membership Committee The Outreach and Membership Committee is composed of Minerva Catral, Andrii Dmytryshyn, Federico Poloni, and David Watkins (Chair). Andrii Dmytryshyn reported for the committee. The Committee is actively inviting people to join ILAS. A total of 1140 invitation letters have been sent, some to persons suggested by ILAS Members. The ILAS Corporate sponsors (Silver US \$200/yr; Gold US \$ 300/yr; Diamond more) are 1. Birkhäuser/Springer (Gold) 2. Elsevier Science, Inc. (Diamond) 3. Taylor & Francis Group - Informa UK Ltd. (Diamond) 4. MathWorks is a new corporate sponsor (Gold) 5. World Scientific Publishing Co. (Gold) 6. Maplesoft (Silver) The Committee created, and is maintaining, Wikipedia pages for ILAS and ELA, in a joint effort with other committees and individuals. The Committee handles the social media presence of ILAS in Facebook and Twitter. Andrii Dmytryshyn finished his report by encouraging the audience to contact the Committee with suggestions of people that might want to join ILAS and asking the audience for encouraging their students to join ILAS (for free)! iii. Journals Committee The Journals Committee (JC) is composed of Louis Deaett (for IMAGE), Froilán Dopico (for ELA), Chi-Kwong Li, Beatrice Meini (Chair), and Peter Šemrl. Froilán Dopico reported for the committee. The new ILAS Bylaws approved on April 2, 2021, were implemented. In details, concerning ELA, they imply that 1. Editors term is from January 1st, YEAR to December 31, YEAR+2. Four months before the term ends, the Editor-in-Chief (EiC) proposes to the JC renewal/termination. 2. Editors who started the service before the new ILAS Bylaws were asked if they were willing to continue the service till December 31, 2023. All accepted except one. 3. The annual report is submitted each year by the EiC in February to the Chair of the JC. Concerning ELA EiC: 1. Michael Tsatsomeros finished his second term as EiC on February 28, 2022 and now he is an Advisory Editor. President Szyld initiated a round of applause in recognition of Michael Tsatsomeros’s dedicated service to ELA and ILAS. Froilán Dopico emphasized that the services of Michael Tsatsomeros to ELA started at least in 2003 as Associate Managing Editor and sincerely thanked Michael for his great work for ELA. 2. Froilan Dopico is now the only EiC. The JC Chair (Beatrice Meini) has the credentials to act as EiC in case it is needed. The JC is working to raise the quality of ELA to high standards. In this line, the JC plans to advertise ELA to attract good authors (at ILAS endorsed conferences, in IMAGE...), and to invite survey papers from selected authors and to discuss other proposals. On December 2023 most of the ELA Editors will finish their term, a renewal is planned. It will be organized by the EiC and the JC. Suggestions of new editors from the Editorial Board of ELA will be considered. Concerning IMAGE, some editors are finishing their term, a renewal of the editorial board is planned; a Book Reviews editor would be advisable. An online meeting of the ILAS JC will be scheduled in the Fall iv. Report on the Electronic Journal of Linear Algebra The EiC of ELA, Froilán Dopico, started by recalling that ELA’s primary goals are to publish high-quality papers that support and catalyze linear algebra research and to reach prompt decisions on submissions. The EiC remarked that the Editorial Board’s efforts to raise the quality of papers that appear in ELA continue, as are the efforts to speed up the handling of submissions. Next the EiC reported on the following data of the year 2021: 1- ELA received 234 new submissions of which: 7 are still under review (as of 06/20/2022), 31 are already accepted or published, 162 were rejected outright by the EICs, i.e., without sending them to reviewers (often in collaboration with Advisory and Associate Editors), and 34 were rejected after review. 2- This amounts to a 69.2 % of outright rejections and 83.8 % of total rejections. 3- These data are like those of 2020. The EiC presented detailed data on rankings and impact factors taken from the Journal Citations Reports (JCR)-Clarivate (2020 edition) on ELA and, for the sake of comparison, on other linear algebra related journals. These journals were LAA, LAMA, SIMAX and Operators & Matrices. The EiC concluded from these and other data that ELA is ranked at a level comparable to Operators & Matrices and Special Matrices, and clearly below SIMAX, LAMA and LAA. With respect to the evolution of ELA’s Impact Factor, the EiC emphasized that a clear improvement was observed in the last four years (2017-20) with respect to the four previous ones (2013-16). Except for the year 2017, ELA is ranked in the third quartile (Q3) in the category Mathematics of JCR since 2013 and the percentile in the category has not improved despite the improvement in the Impact Factor. An effort is needed to improve the quartile of ELA, which is very relevant to several evaluation procedures (research grant proposals, faculty hiring, etc.) in Europe. It would be desirable to reach a level closer to LAA and LAMA in terms of impact factor and percentile, since these two journals have very similar scopes to ELA. The EiC emphasized that a priority of ELA for the next years is to attract greater participation in the content of ELA by ILAS members, since this participation is currently very limited. The EiC strongly encouraged the people in the audience to submit good papers to ELA since it is the research journal of ILAS. Finally, the EiC sincerely thanked all the editors of ELA, all the referees of ELA, all the authors of ELA, and the librarians of the University of Wyoming (hosting ELA) for making ELA possible. Franklin Kenter commented that according to the information in the web, ELA was Q2 not Q3 in the category “Algebra and Number Theory”. The EiC explained that this is the ranking provided by Scopus (not by JCR) and that the number of journals in this category is small (around 100). Franklin Kenter commented that, in his opinion, ILAS should not be worried by the JCR ranking since ELA is doing well with respect to the journals in the “Algebra and Number Theory” category of Scopus. The EiC remarked that, in his opinion, the fact that other linear algebra-oriented journals, as LAA, LAMA and SIMAX, are highly ranked in JCR indicates that the linear algebra community is doing very well in general terms and that ELA should be at the same level of these journals, since they have similar scopes, and at the level of the linear algebra community. Moreover, the EiC emphasized again that ELA is the journal of ILAS and that the reputation of ELA can be seen as an indicator of the reputation of ILAS, which is another reason for improving ELA’s reputation and rankings. Richard Hollister expressed concerns about whether young researchers without permanent positions should submit papers to ELA since the reputation of the journals has an influence in hiring processes. Leslie Hogben commented that the main idea of ELA’s EiC is to attract papers from established researchers in the community. The EiC thanked Leslie Hogben for the clear and adequate remark. v. Report on IMAGE The Editor in Chief of IMAGE, Louis Deaett, started by reporting that IMAGE published a significant volume of content in the three issues from Spring 2021 to Spring 2022. Google web analytics indicated that IMAGE was driving a significant portion of traffic to the ILAS web site during that period. Louis Deaett emphasized that one priority for the next year is to work to ensure that Google is properly indexing individual articles and other pieces of content in IMAGE. Right now, this seems not to be happening, and it is imperative that this is fixed. IMAGE content not being discoverable via Google is a serious problem that hampers the visibility of IMAGE and, by extension, of ILAS. As part of a related initiative, an index of individual articles/interviews/book reviews/etc. should be compiled for the ILAS web site. Louis Deaett presented other plans for IMAGE, which included renewing editorial positions (especially for articles and book reviews) and possibly creating new positions, e.g., for news items. Other planned initiatives included highlighting more mini-symposia related to linear algebra that occur within other conferences and introducing a brief interview Q&A feature to highlight a new or early-career member of ILAS with each issue. A revival of the History of Linear Algebra section may also be considered. F. Transaction of Other Business i. Future ILAS meetings Report by the Vice-President for Conferences, Raf Vandebril Raf Vandebril presented an overview of the ILAS Conferences in the past and future few years. The ILAS 2020 Conference at Galway had to be unfortunately cancelled due to the COVID pandemic and after some discussions it was moved to 2022 to guarantee as much as possible its celebration. This movement also affected the next ILAS Conference originally planned in Madrid for 2022, which will be held in 2023. Vice-President Vandebril thanked the organizers of the Madrid Conference for their flexibility for moving the conference. In 2021 an ILAS embedded conference was held inside the SIAG/LA Applied Linear Algebra Conference, originally to be held in person in New Orleans, but finally held totally virtual, again due to the COVID pandemic. In 2022 the first JMM with ILAS as partner was held, with Pauline van den Driessche as ILAS-speaker and four special ILAS sessions. This meeting was planned in person, but finally was held totally virtual again due to the COVID pandemic. In 2022, the ILAS Conference at Galway was being held at the time of this business meeting. Vice-President Vandebril thanked very much the organizers for their excellent work and, in particular, the Co-Chair of the Local Organizing Committee, Rachel Quinlan, who could not attend in person during the first four days of the conference due to COVID. Vice-President Vandebril initiated a round of applause in recognition of the local organizers of the ILAS Conference at Galway. In 2023 the second JMM with ILAS as partner will be held, with Apoorva Khare as ILAS-speaker, and again four special ILAS sessions. In 2023, the 25th ILAS Conference will be held in Madrid and the organization is progressing well. In 2024, the SIAG/LA Applied Linear Algebra Conference will be held but the location is not yet confirmed. Raf Vandebril informed that ILAS is soliciting proposals for organizing the 2025 and 2026 ILAS Conferences and encouraged the people in the audience to contact him with proposals. Presentation of the 2023 ILAS Conference at Madrid by Fernando De Terán (Chair of the Organizing and Scientific Committees) Fernando De Terán started by showing some pictures of the venue, the School of Forest Engineers of Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, which is a very nice building surrounded by trees and green areas. Next, he listed the members of the organizing and scientific committees and commented that the web page of the conference is already working. The registration fees will be similar to those of the ILAS 2022 Conference at Galway and some relevant dates (expected) will be: (1) September 2022: call for contributed Minisymposia; (2) December 2022: call for contributed talks and posters; and (3) February 2023: call for registration and abstract submission. Fernando De Terán informed that the plenary speakers were being selected and that the next immediate tasks were the selection of the invited Minisymposia and the complete development of the webpage. President Szyld asked about hotels in Madrid. Fernando De Terán answered that Madrid is a big city with many hotels and that the organization is working for recommending some of them in the webpage. ii. Any other business President Szyld asked if somebody wanted to discuss any other issue. No other issues were discussed. G. Adjournment President Szyld thanked the committees' chairs or their representatives for their presentations, which illustrate the breadth and depth of the Society's activities. He also commented on the breadth of the plenary talks at the meeting and commended the Scientific Committee for that. Finally, he thanked the Local organizers for a great meeting. President Szyld adjourned the meeting at 18:05 GMT+1 Respectfully submitted by Froilán Dopico, Vice-President of ILAS. |
| 2023 May 22 ILAS-NET Message No. 2482 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Daniel B. Szyld SUBJECT: ILAS Lectures at Non-ILAS Conferences and General Support for Non-ILAS Events As part of ILAS's commitment to supporting activities in Linear Algebra, the Society maintains a program of providing some support to non-ILAS conferences. This financial support may take one of two forms (a conference may apply for only one of these two forms). ILAS Lectureships at non-ILAS conferences. It is expected that ILAS lecturers will be of the stature of plenary speakers at ILAS conferences and may be supported by up to US\$1000 for expenses, or in the case of a Hans Schneider Lecturer, US\$1500. Reimbursement guidelines may be obtained from the Secretary/Treasurer. General support of conferences of up to $750. Such support could be used for support of student expenses, expenses for participants from developing countries, or plenary speakers. Refreshment costs are not eligible. You are welcome to consult the President of ILAS about what you may propose. This is a reminder that there is a deadline of 30 September 2023 for receipt of proposals for sponsorship of ILAS Lectures at non-ILAS meetings and for general support of conferences taking place in 2024. Please note that we will not be able to consider applications submitted after the deadline as it is important to rank all applications in one go. Each proposal is automatically assumed to be also a request for the ILAS endorsement of the conference. A statement whether the conference will adhere to the ILAS Welcoming and Inclusiveness Statement should be included in the proposal. Further details on the guidelines for proposals can be found at the following link: https://ilasic.org/non-ilas-guidelines/. (Note that the guidelines have been changed from previous years.) In addition, ILAS may endorse a Non-ILAS conference, without financial support. Such endorsed meetings can list ILAS' endorsement on their website, and in turn, the conferences are listed on the website of ILAS-Endorsed Meetings: https://ilasic.org/conferences/#ilas-endorsed-meetings. (Note that the guidelines have been changed from previous years.) Daniel B. Szyld (he/him/his) ILAS President |
| 2023 May 04 ILAS-NET Message No. 2481 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Daniel B. Szyld and Froilán Dopico SUBJECT: ILAS President and Vice-President Annual Report (1 May 2023) ILAS President/Vice-President Annual Report: May 1, 2023 Respectfully submitted by Daniel B. Szyld, ILAS President, szyld@temple.edu, and Froilán M. Dopico, ILAS Vice-President, dopico@math.uc3m.es. The past year has been another momentous year for ILAS. Among the highlights are that the ILAS Community met again in person after the hard times of the COVID pandemic in the 24th ILAS Conference held in Galway, Ireland (June 20-24, 2022); the first ILAS Richard A. Brualdi Early Career Prize was awarded to Michael Tait; the second participation of ILAS as a partner in the Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM) 2023, the first time as partners in person; and a new childcare grant program for ILAS members who are parents of young children so as to make it easier to attend an ILAS Conference. 1. Board-approved actions since the last report include: • The Board approved a new dues structure for the Society. It was decided to maintain the previous dues of \$40 per year for the "standard" membership. A new category of Early Career Member was established and defined as a person within five years of receiving a PhD degree. The dues for Early Career members are at 50% of the standard membership, that is, \$20 per year. As in the past, any member can request that their dues be waived for financial hardship. Current student members continue to enjoy free membership. This dues structure is reflected in the ILAS website at https://ilasic.org/join-ilas/. Lifetime membership continues to be available. Paying for more than one year at a time is also possible. • The Board approved new reimbursement guidelines for the travel and accommodation expenses for ILAS Executive Officers, other officers, and editors in Conferences. These guidelines state clearly in one document the set of common practices followed so far by ILAS on this issue. • The Board approved on October 20, 2022, some revisions of the ILAS Bylaws with the main goal of avoiding the possibility of a conflict of interest in the appointment of the nominating committee members. The new Bylaws can be found at ILAS Website. • The Board approved that the 26th Conference of the International Linear Algebra Society will be held in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, June 23-27, 2025, with Jephian C.-H. Lin (National Sun Yat-sen University) and Matthew M. Lin (National Cheng Kung University) as main organizers. • The Board approved an increase of \$50 for the institutional membership rates. This means an increase from $200 to $250 for the fees of silver institutional members and from $350 to $400 for the fees of gold institutional members. • The Board approved a grant childcare program for ILAS members who are parents of young children to make it easier to attend an ILAS Conference. The grants up to the amount of $500 can be used to pay for childcare either at the conference city, or the home city of the ILAS member. In the latter case, it is for any additional childcare expenses incurred because the ILAS member is attending the conference. The grant can also be used to subsidize travel of a person who would take care of the child during the conference. Complete details can be found at https://ilasic.org/childcare-grants/. 2. Other news: • The inaugural ILAS Richard A. Brualdi Early Career Prize was awarded to Michael Tait (Villanova University, USA) “for outstanding contributions to spectral theory of graphs, developing new techniques, and settling several long-standing open problems in that area." Michael Tait will present the prize lecture at the 25th ILAS Conference in June 2023 in Madrid (Spain). The selection committee consisted of: Marina Arav, Volker Mehrmann, Shmuel Friedland (chair), and Daniel B. Szyld (ILAS President, ex officio). • The 2023 ILAS Taussky–Todd Prize was awarded to Stefan Güttel (University of Manchester, UK) “for deep and impactful work on rational Krylov methods for nonlinear eigenvalue problems and matrix functions, in all aspects: analysis, software development, and applications." Stefan Güttel will present the prize lecture at the 25th ILAS Conference in June 2023 in Madrid (Spain). The selection committee consisted of Nair Abreu, Ilse Ipsen (chair), Joseph Landsberg, Pauline van den Driessche, and Daniel B. Szyld (ILAS President, ex officio). The Joint Mathematics Meetings 2023 (JMM 2023, an ILAS partner conference) was held in Boston, January 4-7, 2023. The ILAS address was given by Apoorva Khare (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore) with title "Analysis and applications of Schur polynomials". There were four ILAS Special Sessions: (1) Matrix Analysis and Applications (organized by Hugo Woerdeman and Edward Poon); (2) Matrices and Operators (organized by Mohsen Aliabadi, Tin-Yau Tam, and Pan-Shun Lau); (3) The Inverse Eigenvalue Problem for a Graph and Zero Forcing (jointly presented with AIM (American Institute of Mathematics) and organized by Mary Flagg and Bryan A Curtis); and (4) Innovative and Effective Ways to Teach Linear Algebra (organized by David M. Strong, Gilbert Strang, Sepideh Stewart, and Megan Wawro). • The Executive Board accepted the recommendation of the JMM Committee that Stephan Ramon Garcia from Pomona College (California) be the ILAS Lecturer at the Joint Mathematics Meetings 2024, to be held in San Francisco, January 3-6, 2024. In addition to this ILAS Lecture, there will be five ILAS Special Sessions scheduled at JMM 2024. The JMM committee consisted of Nair Abreu, Ilse Ipsen (chair), Joseph Landsberg, Pauline van den Driessche, and Daniel B. Szyld (ILAS President, ex officio). • The Israel Gohberg ILAS-IWOTA Lecture Selection Committee selected the ILAS Member Mark Embree as Israel Gohberg Lecturer in the International Workshop on Operator Theory and its Applications (IWOTA) to be held at the University of Kent, UK, August 12-16, 2024. The selection committee consisted of Jussi Behrndt (IWOTA), Kelley Bickel (ILAS), Micheal Dritschel (IWOTA) and Ilya Spitkovsky (ILAS). More information on this lecture series can be found at https://ilasic.org/special-lectures-support/. • The 24th ILAS Conference at Galway (Ireland, June 20-24, 2022) was held in person. It was originally scheduled for 2020 but it had to be postponed due to the COVID pandemic. Despite the uncertainties caused by the pandemic, the conference was very successful and included 260 registered participants, a total of 256 talks and posters (6 posters and 250 talks). There were 10 plenary talks and 40 contributed talks, the rest of the talks were in 22 minisymposia. Some highlights of the conference were the Hans Schneider Prize Lecture delivered by Pauline van den Driessche and the first Israel Gohberg ILAS-IWOTA Lecture in an ILAS Conference delivered by Paul Van Dooren. 3. ILAS elections ran November 1 – 30, 2022, and proceeded via electronic voting. The following were elected to offices with three-year terms that began on March 1, 2023: • President: Daniel B. Szyld • Board of Directors: Fernando De Terán and Chi-Kwong Li The following continue in the ILAS offices which they currently hold: • Vice-President: Froilán M. Dopico (term ends February 28, 2025) • Secretary/Treasurer: Minerva Catral (term ends February 29, 2024) • Second Vice President (for ILAS conferences): Raf Vandebril (term ends February 28, 2026) • Assistant Secretary/Treasurer: Michael Tait (term ends February 28, 2026) • Board of Directors: Paola Boito (term ends February 28, 2025), Melina Freitag (term ends February 29, 2024), Apoorva Khare (term ends February 29, 2024) and Lek-Heng Lim (term ends February 28, 2025). On February 28, 2023, Hugo Woerdeman completed his one-year term on the Executive Board and on the Board of Directors as Past Vice-President. We extend sincere thanks to Hugo for his very long and dedicated service to the Society. Among many other great contributions and initiatives, Hugo’s work as ILAS Vice-President was instrumental in launching and maintaining the new ILAS Website, as well as the ILAS Wikipedia page. Sebastian Cioabă and Dragana Cvetković Ilić completed their terms on the ILAS Board of Directors on February 28, 2023. We thank them for their valuable contributions as Board members; their service to ILAS is most appreciated. We also thank the members of the Nominating Committee–Raymond Chan, Steve Kirkland (Chair), Beatrice Meini, Bryan Shader and Helena Šmigoc–for their efforts on behalf of ILAS, and all of the nominees for their participation in the elections. 4. New appointments and reappointments: Second Vice-President (for ILAS Conferences) Raf Vandebril Assistant Secretary/Treasurer Michael Tait ILAS-NET Manager Pietro Paparella ILAS Website Manager Dominique Guillot ILAS Resident Registered Agent in the State of Florida Fuzhen Zhang Advisory Committee André Ran Ilya Spitkovsky (chair) Françoise Tisseur Vilmar Trevisan Education Committee Anthony Cronin Judith McDonald Rachel Quinlan Sepideh Stewart (chair) David Strong Investment Oversight Committee Minerva Catral Daniel B. Szyld Michael Tait Michael Tsatsomeros Journals Committee: Louis Deaett (for IMAGE) Froilán Dopico (for ELA) Zlatko Drmač Shaun Fallat Heike Fassbender (chair) Outreach and Membership Committee Minerva Catral Andrii Dmytryshyn Shahla Nasserasr (chair) Federico Poloni ILAS Richard A. Brualdi Early Career Prize Committee Marina Arav Shmuel Friedland (Chair) Volker Mehrmann Israel Gohberg ILAS-IWOTA Lecture Committee Jussi Behrndt (IWOTA) Kelly Bickel (ILAS) Michael Dritschel (IWOTA) Ilya Spitkovsky (ILAS) 5. ILAS endorsed the following conferences of interest to ILAS members that have taken place since the last President/Vice President annual report: • A joint meeting of ALAMA and "Due giorni di algebra lineare numerica" (ALAMA 2022-ALN2gg). Universidad de Alcalá, Alcalá de Henares, Spain, June 1-3, 2022. Françoise Tisseur was an ILAS Lecturer. https://congresosalcala.fgua.es/alama2020/ • The 16th Workshop on Numerical Ranges and Numerical Radii (WONRA 2022), Hotel Termas da Curia, Portugal, June 12-15, 2022. http://www.mat.uc.pt/~wonra2022/ XXI Householder Symposium on Numerical Linear Algebra, Selva di Fasano, Italy, June 12-17, 2022. Dario Bini was an ILAS Lecturer. https://users.ba.cnr.it//iac/irmanm21/HHXXI/index.html • 9th International Conference on Matrix Analysis and Applications (ICMAA 2022), University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal, June 15-17, 2022. https://sites.google.com/view/icmaa-2022 • International Workshop on Operator Theory and its Applications (IWOTA 2022), Kraków, Poland, September 6-10, 2022. Hugo J. Woerdeman was a Hans Schneider ILAS Lecturer. https://iwota2022.urk.edu.pl 6. ILAS endorsed the following conferences of interest to ILAS members that will take place in the next months: • Thematic Conference of the Spanish ALAMA Network on Laplacians and M-matrices in graphs, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain, May 11-12, 2023. https://mapthe.upc.edu/en/congresses/jornadas • Western Canada Linear Algebra Meeting (WCLAM 2023), University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, May 27-28, 2023. https://uregina.ca/~sfallat/wclam • The 16th Workshop on Numerical Ranges and Numerical Radii (WONRA 2023), University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal, June 7-9, 2023. https://sites.google.com/view/wonra-2023 • 34th International Workshop on Operator Theory and its Applications (IWOTA 2023), University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland, July 31 - August 4, 2023. Stephan Ramon Garcia will be a Hans Schneider ILAS Lecturer. https://www.helsinki.fi/en/conferences/iwota2023 • International Conference on Linear Algebra and its Applications (ICLAA 2023), Centre for Advanced Research in Applied Mathematics and Statistics (CARAMS), MAHE, Manipal, India, December 18-21, 2023. https://carams.in/events/iclaa2023/ 7. The following ILAS conferences are scheduled: • The 25th ILAS Conference is scheduled to be held at Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros de Montes, Forestales y del Medio Natural (The School of Forest Engineering and Natural Resources) of the Polytechnic University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain, June 12-16, 2023. The chair of the organizing committee is Fernando De Terán. The plenary speakers will be Carlos Beltrán (Universidad de Cantabria, Spain), Erin C. Carson (Charles University, Czech Republic), Stefan Güttel (University of Manchester, UK, ILAS Taussky-Todd Prize Lecture), Nicholas J. Higham (University of Manchester, UK, Hans Schneider Prize Lecture), Elias Jarlebring (KHT Stockholm, Sweden, SIAG-LA Lecture), Shahla Nasserasr (Rochester Institute of Technology, USA), Vanni Noferini (Aalto University, Finland, LAMA Lecture), Rachel Quinlan (University of Galway, Ireland), Michael Tait (Villanova University, USA, ILAS Richard A. Brualdi Early Career Prize Lecture), Cynthia Vinzant (University of Washington, USA). • The 26th ILAS Conference will be held in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, June 23-27, 2025, with Jephian C.-H. Lin (National Sun Yat-sen University) and Matthew M. Lin (National Cheng Kung University) as main organizers. 8. The following ILAS partner conferences are scheduled: • The 2024 Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM) will be held in San Francisco, USA, January 3-6, 2024. Stephan Ramon Garcia from Pomona College (California) will be the ILAS Lecturer and five ILAS Special Sessions will be scheduled. • The SIAM Conference on Applied Linear Algebra will be held in Paris, France, May 12-16, 2024. Daniel Kressner and Laura Grigori are the chairs of the organizing committee. Beatrice Meini and Andrii Dmytryshyn will be the ILAS plenary speakers in the conference. 9. The Electronic Journal of Linear Algebra (ELA) is now in its 39th volume. ELA’s URL is https://journals.uwyo.edu/index.php/ela. The volume 38 was published in 2022 and contains 56 papers. ELA received 262 new submissions in 2022. The current acceptance rate is less than 23%. In 2022, 69774 downloads and 74673 abstract views of ELA papers occurred. Froilán M. Dopico (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) is the Editor-in-Chief. ILAS members are strongly encouraged to submit their work to ELA, the flagship research journal of our society. 10. IMAGE is the semi-annual bulletin for ILAS, available online at https://ilasic.org/image/ . The Editor-in-Chief is Louis Deaett (Quinnipiac University). In 2022, the website of IMAGE received 861 visits. 11. ILAS-NET is a moderated electronic newsletter for mathematicians worldwide, with a focus on linear algebra. It is managed by Pietro Paparella (University of Washington Bothell). An archive of ILAS-NET messages is available at https://ilasic.org/ilas-net/ . To send a message to ILAS-NET, please send the message (preferably in text format) in an email to pietrop@uw.edu indicating that you would like it to be posted on ILAS-NET. If the message is approved, it will be posted soon afterwards. To subscribe to ILAS-NET, please go to https://www.ilasic.org/ilas-net/ By April 21, 2023, there were 1165 contacts in the ILAS-NET "audience", of which 1015 were subscribers. 12. ILAS’s website is located at https://ilasic.org/ and highlights the main activities of ILAS: the Electronic Journal of Linear Algebra (ELA), the conferences, IMAGE, ILAS-NET, and other activities. In addition, the website provides general information about ILAS (e.g., ILAS officers, bylaws, special lecturers, ILAS prizes, grant programs) as well as links to pages of interest to the ILAS community. Currently it is managed by Dominique Guillot (University of Delaware). In 2022, the website of ILAS received 11365 pageviews, from users from 93 different countries. The front page received 5096 of these pageviews, the conference page 912, and the IMAGE page 861. Finally, we want to express our great gratitude to all the officers of ILAS who all show wonderful dedication to the society, as well as to all the individual members of ILAS and our corporate sponsors. Without any of them ILAS would not be what it is today. Respectfully submitted, Daniel B. Szyld, ILAS President (szyld@temple.edu); and Froilán M. Dopico, ILAS Vice-President (dopico@math.uc3m.es) |
| 2023 April 19 ILAS-NET Message No. 2480 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Nicolas Gillis SUBJECT: Doctoral and Postdoctoral Positions The research group of Nicolas Gillis at the University of Mons (Belgium) is seeking highly qualified candidates for one doctoral and one postdoctoral position funded by the ERC (European Research Council). The project focuses on the theory, algorithms and applications of low-dimensional representations of high-dimensional data based on low-rank matrix approximations; see https://sites.google.com/site/nicolasgillis/projects/erc-cons for a description of the project and the objectives. The successful candidates will have the flexibility to choose a topic within the range of this project. Your profile is a MSc/PhD in applied mathematics, mathematics, computer science, or a related discipline. You must have an expertise in at least one of these fields: optimization, computational complexity, numerical linear algebra, data mining and machine learning. You should have excellent programming skills in a numerical language (such as MATLAB), and good communications skills, both written and oral, in English. We offer: • A research team constituted of one professor, three postdoctoral researchers and three PhD students. • Travel expenses for conferences, with the possibility for a short stay abroad. Computing resources (a laptop). • A 12-month contract that can be extended (the project lasts until 2021). The starting date is flexible but should be no later than the 1st of September 2018. To apply: applicants are requested to send a detailed CV, a list of publications (if applicable), and • for the PhD students: a brief statement of research interests. • for the Postdocs: a 2-page research statement explaining why the candidate is interested in working in the research topics described above and how it is connected to his/her PhD background. This material (in pdf), together with the contact of two persons of reference that can be contacted, shall be sent to erc.coloramap@gmail.com. Don’t hesitate to contact me at the same address if you have any questions about the positions. Candidate Selection: • Pre-selection of candidates based on their application files. • (remote) Interview of the short-listed candidates. The positions remain open until they are filled. |
| 2023 April 19 ILAS-NET Message No. 2479 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Daniel B. Szyld SUBJECT: Childcare Grants and Other Initiatives ILAS is providing grants to ILAS members who are parents of young children so as to make it easier to attend an ILAS Conference. The grants up to the amount of \$500 can be used to pay for childcare either at the conference city, or the home city of the ILAS member. In the latter case, it is for any additional childcare expenses incurred because the ILAS member is attending the conference. The grant can also be used to subsidize the travel of a person who would take care of the child during the conference. Applications need to be sent at least two months in advance of the conference dates indicating: • Name of the ILAS member • Name of the child/ren and their ages • Expected budget and type of expense Applications can be sent directly to the ILAS President. The ILAS President will communicate the decision to each applicant no later than one month after the application is received. Reimbursements will be sent to the applicant after the applicant has attended the conference and once appropriate receipts for up to $500 have been submitted to the ILAS Secretary/Treasurer. For the ILAS Conference in Madrid, 12–16 June, 2023, the deadline for applications is May 1st, 2023. Other initiatives that ILAS is putting into place include: • Aiming to have a break every two hours or so during the ILAS conferences to allow parents see their children if necessary. • Invited speakers with young children could stay in apartments and not necessarily in a hotel. • If the caretaker/companion is traveling with the parent, ILAS will facilitate free registration to the conference if such caretaker wishes to attend a few lectures. • The ILAS President will aim to put in contact parents of young children in case they want to coordinate activities. • Children will be welcomed at the coffee breaks, excursions, or other social activities. Daniel B. Szyld (he/him/his) ILAS President |
| 2023 April 14 ILAS-NET Message No. 2478 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Sepideh Stewart SUBJECT: Linear Algebra Education Workshop The ILAS education committee is excited to announce that there will be a workshop on Sunday afternoon (before the start of the ILAS conference), on June 11th, 2023, in Madrid from 3–5:30 pm, with the venue in one of the students' dormitories of Universidad Complutense de Madrid. The purpose of the workshop wil be to engage in discussing and building a library of lesson plans for teaching linear algebra. To read more about the idea of a Lesson Plan, see IMAGE 69. We envisage participants working in small groups to devise new or share existing lesson plans on teaching specific linear algebra topics of their choosing. These can be elementary topics or content from an upper-division undergraduate or graduate linear algebra course. We will follow up with more information, but for now, we ask you to consider arriving in Madrid early in time to participate in this workshop. Please enter your name and information by May 10th, 2023, into the Google form if you hope to attend this workshop. This workshop will be free for all conference participants. You are welcome and encouraged to share your experiences and ideas on teaching linear algebra. Sepideh Stewart (ILAS Education Committee Chair) |
| 2023 April 12 ILAS-NET Message No. 2477 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Claudia Justel SUBJECT: Call for papers: Workshop on Spectral Graph Theory 2023—Nair Abreu (70+3)rd birthday The Brazilian community in Spectral Graph Theory is very pleased to announce that the Workshop on Spectral Graph Theory 2023, in honor of Nair Abreu for her (70+3)rd birthday, will be held at Universidade Federal Fluminense in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from October 24 to 27, 2023. The aim of this workshop is to bring together young and experienced researchers in subjects related to spectral graph theory and its applications. The official language of the event is English. Those interested in presenting their work should submit a 1 page abstract (see the template). The abstract submission deadline is June, 30th. Accepted abstracts will be announced by July, 15th. For an accepted abstract to be included in the final program, the presenting author is required to pay the registration fee by August, 10th. For more information, please access http://spectralgraphtheory.org/ or feel free to contact us by e-mail at wspectralgraphtheory@gmail.com. |
| 2023 April 12 ILAS-NET Message No. 2476 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Christine Andrews-Larson SUBJECT: Call for Abstracts—MAA MathFest 2023 Dear Colleagues: Saturday April 30 at 11:59 PM EDT is the deadline to submit an abstract to talk in a themed contributed paper session at MAA MathFest in Tampa, Florida August 2–5, 2023. Please consider submitting a talk on your recent scholarly work. Link for more information about Mathfest, to register (Early Bird rates end April 15, Advance rates run through June 30), or to submit an abstract: MAA MathFest 2023. We especially invite submissions for our themed contributed paper session: Linear Algebra: Modern Applications and Computation This session invites examples of modern applications of linear algebra and computation successfully incorporated in undergraduate linear algebra courses with evidence of that success in terms of student learning, student engagement, student persistence in STEM, etc. and/or recent research in linear algebra accessible to undergraduates, for example topics for undergraduate research projects, course projects, or illustrative examples for a course. Organizers: Suzanne Dorée, Augsburg University (doree@augsburg.edu) Christine Andrews-Larson, Florida State University David Austin, Grand Valley State University Monika Kiss, St. Leo's University Some additional advice is below. I hope to see many of you in Tampa this summer! Christy Andrews-Larson New to MAA Themed Contributed Paper Sessions? Logistics and Expectations: Each themed contributed paper session is a sequence of 15 minute talks on topics of general interest to MAA members and meeting participants (i.e. not highly specialized talks for collaborators). To give a talk, you first need to submit an abstract by the deadline. Next the organizers consider each abstract to evaluate its fit with the session description. Proposers are notified of the decision fairly quickly. In practice, most abstracts are accepted. You must register for the meetings and be present in person to present. Each talk is limited to one speaker and any one person may only give one talk total across the contributed paper sessions. Some advice from organizer Su Dorée in preparing the abstract and talk: We are excited to hear about the work you are doing to modernize the Linear Algebra curriculum at the undergraduate level or work you are doing in Linear Algebra research that lends itself to use in undergraduate courses. Talks should include at least one example of the mathematics itself that might spark the interest of audience members enough to encourage them to modernize their own courses. Be sure the abstract addresses how your work connects to undergraduates AND applications or computations in Linear Algebra. While a little institutional context is important, the bulk of your talk should be what you did that was new or innovative, why you did it, how well it worked to implement this idea in the curriculum (or how someone might do that), and some lessons learned. The audience will especially perk up at specific ideas that they can use in their own curriculum. Rather than list everything you did, consider selecting a succulent example or two to whet our appetite and then offer a way for folks to contact you, for example to see your materials, learn more about your pedagogy, or see the specific results of assessment. In addressing assessment or research on learning Linear Algebra, the audience is going to be most interested in what your research questions were and how you actually collected data, so that we can potentially replicate those methods ourselves. Limit data to a few key numbers or quotes as much of the audience is likely to be math professors, not education researchers, administrators, or funding agencies. |
| 2023 March 29 ILAS-NET Message No. 2475 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Shaun Fallat SUBJECT: Second Announcement: Western Canada Linear Algebra Meeting Second Conference Announcement: Western Canada Linear Algebra Meeting University of Regina, Regina May 27–28, 2023 The Western Canada Linear Algebra Meeting (WCLAM) provides an opportunity for all mathematicians in western Canada working in linear algebra and related fields to meet present accounts of their recent research, and to have informal discussions. While the meeting has a regional base, it also attracts people from outside the geographical area. Participation is open to anyone who is interested in attending or speaking at the meeting. WCLAM '23 will be held at the University of Regina in Regina on May 27–28, and the program will include the following two featured plenary speakers: Jane Breen, Ontario Tech University Leslie Hogben, Iowa State University Contributed Lectures/Posters: Participants who wish to present a 20 to 25-minute lecture or a poster should send a title/abstract to: shaun.fallat@uregina.ca Deadline for Abstract submission: 25 April 2023. To register, email shaun.fallat@uregina.ca and please include the following information: Your name and institution. Your position (faculty member, postdoctoral researcher, graduate student, undergraduate student). Whether you will or will not attend an informal dinner (evening of May 27). (There will be an extra charge for the banquet. Please indicate if you are bringing a guest.) Whether you plan to give a talk or present a poster. (Your title/abstract can be submitted with the registration or separately.) Registration Fee: $30 (Canadian), payable by cash or cheque (made out to the University of Regina) at the meeting. Please register by 10 May 2023. Further information about the conference, the University, and accommodation while attending WCLAM 2023 can be found at the conference website: https://uregina.ca/~sfallat/wclam WCLAM Organising Committee: Shaun Fallat (Regina), Hadi Kharaghani (Lethbridge), Steve Kirkland (Manitoba), Peter Lancaster (Calgary), Sarah Plosker (Brandon), Michael Tsatsomeros (Washington State), and Pauline van den Driessche (Victoria). Local Organising Committee: Shaun Fallat, S. Ahmad Mojallal, and Prateek K. Vishwakarma (Regina) The WCLAM Organising Committee gratefully acknowledges the generous support for this meeting provided by The Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences, the Department of Mathematics & Statistics and the Faculty of Science at the University of Regina. |
| 2023 March 16 ILAS-NET Message No. 2474 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Daniel B. Szyld SUBJECT: Apoorva Khare ILAS Address at JMM 2023 now on YouTube If you missed the in-person ILAS address at the Joint Mathematics Meeting in January in Boston (or if you want to hear it again) given by Apporva Khare and titled "Analysis Applications of Schur Polynomials", it is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHYnlpcuOLo As a reminder, the ILAS address at the JMM 2024 in San Francisco will be given by Stephan Ramon Garcia. If you are considering organizing a special session for JMM 2024, please let our VP for Conferences Raf Vandebril know. The deadline for submissions is fast approaching. Daniel B. Szyld (he/him/his) ILAS President |
| 2023 March 14 ILAS-NET Message No. 2473 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Manjunatha Prasad Karantha SUBJECT: ICLAA 2023 and IWSMGA 2023 at CARAMS, MAHE, Manipal, India International Conference on Linear Algebra and its Applications (ICLAA 2023), fifth in its sequel, will be organized by Center for Advanced Research in Applied Mathematics & Statistics, MAHE, Manipal, India, during December 18–21, 2023. The Scientific Advisory Committee consists of Ravindra B Bapat (Chairman), Manjunatha Prasad Karantha (convener), Steve Kirkland, and Simo Puntanen. The conference is endorsed by ILAS. The registration link is now open. The conference will be following a preconference workshop `International Workshop on Special Matrices, Graphs, and Applications' (IWSMGA 2023) for which the resource persons are Abraham Berman, Ravindra B Bapat, S K Neogy, Sivaramakrishnan Sivasubramanian and others. The conference consists of special sessions on (i) Special Matrices (ii) Matrix Methods in Statistics, and (iii) Matrices and Graphs, which are in honor of leading mathematicians in association with CARAMS for a long time. For more details, such as speakers, special issues, and best paper award contest, please visit CARAMS web page. The organizers cordially invite all to join them for the events held at MAHE, Manipal. Organizing Secretary, ILAS 2023 CARAMS, MAHE, Manipal, India Web : https://carams.in/ email: carams.mahe@gmail.com Conference Page: https://carams.in/events/iclaa2023/ Workshop Page: https://carams.in/events/iwsmga2023/ email : iclaa2023.mahe@gmail.com |
| 2023 March 08 ILAS-NET Message No. 2472 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Volker Mehrmann SUBJECT: Ludwig Elsner (January 17, 1939–February 25, 2023) With deep sadness we announce that Ludwig Elsner passed away. He died on February 25, 2023 in Halle (Westfalia), Germany, at the age of 84. Ludwig, professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Bielefeld, has been well-known for his excellent work in linear and multi-linear algebra, in numerical linear algebra, and in particular for his inclusion theorems for eigenvalues with their concise and elegant proofs. His family, his many friends, colleagues and students all remember him as an attentive, kind, calm, caring, competent and appreciative person. A more extensive obituary will be posted soon. A. Bunse-Gerstner, J. Liesen, V. Mehrmann, R. Nabben |
| 2023 February 28 ILAS-NET Message No. 2471 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Daniel B. Szyld SUBJECT: Call for Suggestions from Parents of Young Children Dear ILAS members: Following our successful conference in Galway, Ireland, in 2022, and taking into account the expected attendance at the conference being organized for Madrid in 2023, the ILAS Board is committed to continue to organize our conferences in person. We will not be able to offer an hybrid option. The ILAS Board is considering awarding grants to members who are parents of young children in order to help with childcare costs incurred while the member is attending an ILAS Conference. We would very much like to hear from our members with any suggestions that might provide a more supportive environment for parents of young children at our conferences. Please send your suggestions or comments directly to me. Daniel B. Szyld (he/him/his) ILAS President |
| 2023 February 27 ILAS-NET Message No. 2470 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Jephian C.-H. Lin SUBJECT: Conference Announcements and Reports in IMAGE Dear ILAS members: IMAGE—the bulletin of ILAS—will release its next issue in June. If you are organizing or have organized an event, you are encouraged to submit the announcement or the report for it, and we would be happy to include them in the "Upcoming Conferences and Workshops" or the "Conference Reports" sections of IMAGE. If you are interested in doing so, please send your announcement / report to jephianlin [at] gmail [dot] com by April 15. And please feel free to let me know if you have any questions through the same email address. Many thanks, Jephian C.-H. Lin Conference Editor of ILAS IMAGE |
| 2023 February 22 ILAS-NET Message No. 2469 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Beatrice Meini SUBJECT: Call for Expressions-of-Interest at the University of Pisa The Department of Mathematics, University of Pisa (Italy), posted a call for expressions-of-interest for academic positions within the “Dipartimento d’Eccellenza” (“Department of Excellence”) Project (https://www.dm.unipi.it/en/department-of-excellence/). We welcome applications in all areas of mathematics, with expertise in one or more subjects: machine learning, data science, data assimilation, model order reduction, high dimensional statistics, complex networks and applications to the modeling of physical phenomena and life sciences. Appointments can be at Tenure Track Researcher, Associate or Full Professor level, depending on the seniority of the profile. Interested candidates can write to segamm@dm.unipi.it, including a letter of motivation and a CV, with a description of current research and teaching activities, by Friday, March 31, 2023. More information can be found at: https://www.dm.unipi.it/en/call-for-expression-of-interest/. |
| 2023 February 20 ILAS-NET Message No. 2468 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Aida Abiad SUBJECT: PhD-position—Eindhoven University of Technology The Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Eindhoven University of Technology (The Netherlands) has a vacancy for a four-year PhD-position within the Vidi NWO project "Finding graph structure beyond the spectrum: new frontiers and new methods". This PhD position is supervised by Aida Abiad (https://aidaabiad.win.tue.nl/). The vacancy can be found at: https://jobs.tue.nl/en/vacancy/phd-position-in-algebraic-combinatorics-at-tu-eindhoven-982914.html. The vacancy closing date will be April 30, 2023, or until the position is filled. The preferred starting date is September 2023. PROJECT DESCRIPTION This project seeks to deduce structural properties of a graph from the graph spectrum. Properties such as connectedness, diameter and regularity, are known to be related to the spectrum of a graph. Nevertheless, for most relevant graph structures the problem remains open, and the existing spectral tools are not sufficient, indicating that genuinely new methods are needed. In this project we will tackle this challenge by strengthening and unifying spectral methods and combining them with tools from other fields like combinatorial optimization, finite geometry and group theory. The successful candidate for this PhD position will work under the supervision of Aida Abiad in the group Combinatorial Optimization (https://www.tue.nl/en/) of the department of Mathematics and Computer Science of TU/e. Your responsibilities include to perform scientific research on the topic of the above-mentioned project and to publish your results at international conferences and in international journals. For a small percentage of your time, you will be asked to assist with educational tasks (course support and supervision of students). JOB REQUIREMENTS - You have a bachelor and master degree in Mathematics. - You have a strong background in Graph Theory and/or Combinatorics. - You are enthusiastic about programming, preferably in Sage/Python. - You have good communication skills. - You are creative, ambitious, as well as self-motivated, proactive, and goal-oriented. - You have a good command of the English language (knowledge of Dutch is not required). CONDITIONS OF EMPLOYMENT A meaningful job in a dynamic and ambitious university, in an interdisciplinary setting and within an international network. You will work on a beautiful, green campus within walking distance of the central train station. In addition, we offer you: - Full-time employment for four years, with an intermediate evaluation (go/no-go) after nine months. You will spend 10% of your employment on teaching tasks. - Salary and benefits (such as a pension scheme, paid pregnancy and maternity leave, partially paid parental leave) in accordance with the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities. - A year-end bonus of 8.3% and annual vacation pay of 8%. - High-quality training programs and other support to grow into a self-aware, autonomous scientific researcher. At TU/e we challenge you to take charge of your own learning process. - An excellent technical infrastructure, on-campus children's day care and sports facilities. - An allowance for commuting, working from home and internet costs. - A Staff Immigration Team and a tax compensation scheme (the 30% facility) for international candidates. FURTHER INFORMATION For more information about the project or about the working conditions, please contact Aida Abiad (a.abiad.monge@tue.nl). HOW TO APPLY Applications should be done through the following website: https://jobs.tue.nl/en/vacancy/phd-position-in-algebraic-combinatorics-at-tu-eindhoven-982914.html. Besides personal and contact information, you should upload the following documents as PDFs: - A cover letter in which you describe your motivation, research experience, interests, and qualifications for the position. - A curriculum vitae, including a list of publications (if existing) and two academic references. We do not need reference letters at this stage. - BSc and MSc transcripts Do not upload any other documents |
| 2023 February 20 ILAS-NET Message No. 2467 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Fernando De Terán SUBJECT: ILAS2023: Registration open Dear ILAS members: Registration for the ILAS2023 meeting is now open at https://ilas2023.es/registration/. To register, please follow the link at the bottom of the previous page. The deadline for registering is May 1st, 2023, whereas the deadline for early bird registration is April 1st, 2023. We are looking forward to seeing you in Madrid! Best regards, Fernando De Terán (on behalf of the Local Organizing Committee of ILAS2023) |
| 2023 February 07 ILAS-NET Message No. 2466 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Pan Shun Lau and Tin-Yau Tam SUBJECT: 2023 Spring Biweekly Matrix Seminar on Zoom at UNR The 2023 Spring Biweekly Matrix Seminar at the University of Nevada, Reno, USA will be held on Zoom at 4:00–4:50 on Fridays (US Pacific Time). All are welcome to join. For talk schedule see https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MswSd16JqsZE294kYCXujLio4cnAiuYv6QKRc6BxvI0/edit# and the Zoom link is https://unr.zoom.us/j/85690520546. Please contact Pan Shun Lau at plau@unr.edu if you have any questions. Best regards, Pan Shun Lau and Tin-Yau Tam |
| 2023 February 05 ILAS-NET Message No. 2465 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Daniel B. Szyld SUBJECT: Announcement of the ILAS Address at JMM 2024 Dear ILAS members and friends: It is with great pleasure to announce the selection of the ILAS Lecturer for the Joint Mathematics Meeting to be held in San Francisco on January 3–6, 2024. The ILAS Address will be delivered by Stephan Ramon Garcia from Pomona College. I look forward to seeing many of you at the lecture. I would like to publicly thank the ILAS Committee who worked on this selection: Nair Abreu, Ilse Ipsen (Chair), Joseph Landsberg, and Pauline van den Driessche. Daniel B. Szyld ILAS President |
| 2023 February 03 ILAS-NET Message No. 2464 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Sepideh Stewart SUBJECT: Reminder: Papers for PRIMUS special issue due Feb 28 Dear All: The ILAS education committee is pleased to announce a new special issue of PRIMUS titled Teaching Linear Algebra: an International Perspective. The call-for-papers can be found here: https://primusmath.com/2022/09/12/call-for-papers-teaching-linear-algebra-an-international-perspective/. The issue will be guest edited by the ILAS Education Committee Members: Anthony Cronin (University College Dublin), Judith McDonald (Washington State University), Rachel Quinlan (National University of Ireland, Galway), Sepideh Stewart (University of Oklahoma), and David Strong (Pepperdine University). We would like to invite you to submit a paper on teaching linear algebra. Papers for this special issue should be approximately 10-15 pages long. Submissions will be accepted until 28-February-2023. Sepideh Stewart ILAS Education Committee (Chair) |
| 2023 February 01 ILAS-NET Message No. 2463 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Fernando De Terán SUBJECT: ILAS2023 (Madrid): Deadline Extended for Contributed Talks The deadline for submitting contributed talks at ILAS2023 was extended to February 15th. Please use the website of the conference to submit your abstract (select "Contributed talk" in the drop-down menu): https://ilas2023.es/submissions/. We are looking forward to seeing you in Madrid! Fernando De Terán, on behalf of the Local Organizing Committee. |
| 2023 February 01 ILAS-NET Message No. 2462 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Judi McDonald SUBJECT: ILAS-ED Video Podcasts The ILAS Education Committee (ILAS‑ED) committee is experimenting with a new format for the Linear Algebra Education Seminar. This semester, we are producing a video podcast instead. A link for each video podcast will be mailed out each month, and they will remain available on the ILAS website. To view the January video podcast, follow the link https://la-education.oucreate.com/monthly-video-podcasts-2023/ where Mike Michailidis will share with you information about Linear Algebra Applications for the Modern World. Please view this podcast at your leisure. I also find it is a great video to share with my students to give them a sense of how important linear algebra is in modern industrial applications. To view videos and slides from the Fall 2021 through Fall 2022 seminars, visit the link: https://la-education.oucreate.com/monthly-seminar/. Please let us know if you like the video podcast format. |
| 2023 January 31 ILAS-NET Message No. 2461 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Shaun Fallat SUBJECT: 2023 Western Canada Linear Algebra Meeting Conference Announcement Western Canada Linear Algebra Meeting University of Regina, Regina May 27–28, 2023 The Western Canada Linear Algebra Meeting (WCLAM) provides an opportunity for all mathematicians in western Canada working in linear algebra and related fields to meet present accounts of their recent research, and to have informal discussions. While the meeting has a regional base, it also attracts people from outside the geographical area. Participation is open to anyone who is interested in attending or speaking at the meeting. WCLAM '23 will be held at the University of Regina in Regina on May 27–28, and the program will include the following two featured plenary speakers: • Jane Breen, Ontario Tech University • Leslie Hogben, Iowa State University Contributed Lectures/Posters: Participants who wish to present a 20 to 25-minute lecture or a poster should send a title/abstract to: shaun.fallat@uregina.ca Deadline for Abstract submission: 25 April 2023. To register, email shaun.fallat@uregina.ca and please include the following information: • Your name and institution. • Your position (faculty member, postdoctoral researcher, graduate student, undergraduate student). • Whether you will or will not attend an informal dinner (evening of May 27). (There will be an extra charge for the banquet. Please indicate if you are bringing a guest.) • Whether you plan to give a talk or present a poster. (Your title/abstract can be submitted with the registration or separately.) Registration Fee: $30 (Canadian), payable by cash or cheque (made out to the University of Regina) at the meeting. Registration deadline: 10 May 2023. Further information about the conference, the University, and accommodation while attending WCLAM 2023 can be found at the conference website: https://uregina.ca/~sfallat/wclam WCLAM Organising Committee: Shaun Fallat (Regina), Hadi Kharaghani (Lethbridge), Steve Kirkland (Manitoba), Peter Lancaster (Calgary), Sarah Plosker (Brandon), Michael Tsatsomeros (Washington State), and Pauline van den Driessche (Victoria). Local Organising Committee: Shaun Fallat, S. Ahmad Mojallal, and Prateek K. Vishwakarma (Regina) The WCLAM Organising Committee gratefully acknowledges the generous support for this meeting provided by The Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences, the Department of Mathematics & Statistics and the Faculty of Science at the University of Regina. |
| 2023 January 24 ILAS-NET Message No. 2460 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Daniel B. Szyld SUBJECT: ILAS Lectures at Non-ILAS Conferences and General Support at Non-ILAS Events As part of ILAS's commitment to supporting activities in Linear Algebra, the Society maintains a program of providing some support to non-ILAS conferences. This financial support may take one of two forms (a conference may apply for only one of these two forms). ILAS Lectureships at non-ILAS conferences. It is expected that ILAS lecturers will be of the stature of plenary speakers at ILAS conferences and may be supported by up to US\$1000 for expenses, or in the case of a Hans Schneider Lecturer, US\$1500. Reimbursement guidelines may be obtained from the Secretary/Treasurer. General support of conferences of up to \$750. Such support could be used for support of student expenses, expenses for participants from developing countries, or plenary speakers. Refreshment costs are not eligible. You are welcome to consult the President of ILAS about what you may propose. This is a reminder that there is a deadline of 30 September 2023 for receipt of proposals for sponsorship of ILAS Lectures at non-ILAS meetings and for general support of conferences taking place in 2024. Please note that we will not be able to consider applications submitted after the deadline as it is important to rank all applications in one go. Each proposal is automatically assumed to be also a request for the ILAS endorsement of the conference. A statement whether the conference will adhere to the ILAS Welcoming and Inclusiveness Statement should be included in the proposal. Further details on the guidelines for proposals can be found at the following link: https://ilasic.org/non-ilas-guidelines/. In addition, ILAS may endorse a Non-ILAS conference, without financial support. Such endorsed meetings can list ILAS' endorsement on their website, and in turn, the conferences are listed on the website of ILAS-Endorsed Meetings: https://ilasic.org/conferences/#ilas-endorsed-meetings. Daniel B. Szyld ILAS President |
| 2023 January 19 ILAS-NET Message No. 2459 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Andrii Dmytryshyn SUBJECT: Postdoctoral position at Örebro University Örebro University and the School of Science and Technology are looking for a postdoc in mathematics (linear algebra, optimization, ...). The project is about data completion problem for motion capture systems. Motion-capture systems are used for investigating and improving various mechanical processes. There are many ways of tracking motion using such systems. In the project we focus on the problems associated with the usage of passive markers and video recording. This type of tracking requires that the markers are visible in the video which is not always the case. Therefore, tracking the motions may become problematic or even impossible and, therefore, a sophisticated method for completing the data from the missing markers is needed. If you are interested in this position send your CV to andrii.dmytryshyn@oru.se as soon as possible. |
| 2023 January 19 ILAS-NET Message No. 2458 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Daniel B. Szyld SUBJECT: Opportunities: Conference, Small meetings, Mentoring Dear ILAS members and friends: Today I bring three items to your attention. A reminder that the submission of contributed talks to the 25th ILAS Conference in Madrid next June is open; see the conference website: https://ilas2023.es/ As it happens, the New York Times selected Madrid as one the 52 places to visit in 2023, see https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/travel/52-places-travel-2023.html (Madrid is number 44 in the list). Another reason to attend the ILAS Conference!! The NSF Mathematics Institutes (see https://mathinstitutes.org/) as well as PIMS (see https://www.pims.math.ca/) and BIRS (see https://www.birs.ca/) and its affiliates have a plethora of opportunities for Linear Algebra research (workshops, conferences, thematic semesters, collaborations, etc.). I encourage you to consider taking advantage of these opportunities. Lastly, the Prison Mathematics Projects (https://www.prisonmathproject.org/) has mentorship opportunities for you to help a prisoner (in the US) with interest in mathematics. Daniel B. Szyld ILAS President |
| 2023 January 15 ILAS-NET Message No. 2457 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Tin-Yau Tam SUBJECT: Postdoc position Dear ILAS members and friends: Happy New Year! The Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Nevada, Reno has an opening of a two-year postdoc position with a possible one-year extension, starting August 1, 2023. The job responsibilities include teaching two courses per semester and conducting research with our current faculty + minimal amount of service. The compensation is $52,000 per year. Nevada has no state income tax. For those who are interested, please contact Tin-Yau Tam (ttam@unr.edu), Chair and Professor, by February 10, 2023. The materials listed below are required for our postdoc search committee. • CV • Cover letter • Applicants must also arrange for at least three (3) reference letters, with at least one discussing the applicant’s teaching ability. • Research Statement • Teaching Statement Tin-Yau Tam Department Chair & Professor Seneca C. and Mary B. Weeks Chair in Mathematics Mathematics and Statistics, University of Nevada, Reno Email: ttam@unr.edu |
| 2023 January 15 ILAS-NET Message No. 2456 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Ilse Ipsen SUBJECT: Call for nominations for the 2024 ILAS JMM Lecturer Dear ILAS members: We are soliciting suggestions for the ILAS Lecturer at the 2024 Joint Mathematical Meetings (JMM) in San Francisco, CA, USA, 3–6 January 2024. The ILAS JMM Lecturer will also have the opportunity to organize one or more special sessions at the JMM. Please send your suggestions for ILAS JMM Lecturers, along with a short justification and a CV, if possible, to Ilse Ipsen (ipsen@ncsu.edu) by 31 January 2023. We look forward to hearing from you, and with best regards, Ilse Ipsen (on behalf of the selection committee [Nair Abreu, Joseph Landsberg, Pauline van den Driessche, and Daniel Szyld]) |
| 2023 January 12 ILAS-NET Message No. 2455 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Daniel B. Szyld SUBJECT: JMM2023 Report & Call for Special Sessions for JMM 2024 Dear ILAS members and friends of ILAS: We just concluded the activities of the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Boston. As you know, ILAS is a partner member of the JMM, and this was the first time we attended in-person in this capacity. It was nice to see so many ILAS people at the ILAS address, given by Apoorva Khare, and at the multiple ILAS Special Sessions. Apoorva Khare's talk was titled "Analysis and applications of Schur polynomials". In his lecture, Prof. Khare presented several results involving Schur polynomials, viewed as functions on the positive orthant. A true tour de force involving material studied since the XVIII Century, and others from more recent times. This talk was taped. So, in a month or so, it will appear on the AMS YouTube channel. Apoorva was publicly recognized for his lecture at the JMM Prize Ceremony and awarded a framed certificate (official pictures coming soon). The four special sessions were lively and well-attended. They were: • Matrix Analysis and Applications (organized by Hugo Woerdeman and Edward Poon), • Matrices and Operators (Organized by Mohsen Aliabadi, Tin-Yau Tam, and Pan-Shun Lau), • The Inverse Eigenvalue Problem for a Graph and Zero Forcing (jointly presented with AIM and organized by Mary Flagg and Bryan A Curtis), and • Innovative and Effective Ways to Teach Linear Algebra (organized by David M. Strong, Gil Strang, Sepideh Stewart, and Megan Wawro). It is not too early to start thinking of organizing an ILAS Special Session for the JMM 2024 to be held in early January in San Francisco. Please consider doing so and by writing to Raf Vandebril (raf.vandebril@kuleuven.be), VP for Conferences. Daniel B. Szyld ILAS President |
| 2023 January 09 ILAS-NET Message No. 2454 CONTRIBUTED ANNOUNCEMENT FROM: Hermie Monterde SUBJECT: Invitation to attend 05C50 online Dear ILAS members: Happy new year! The 05C50 Online is an online international seminar which showcases recent research trends in Graphs and Matrices, organized by Dr. Steve Kirkland and Hermie Monterde from the University of Manitoba. We will start 2023 with a bang with talks from Michael Tait on January 13 and Helena Šmigoc on January 27. As usual, the seminar will run once every two weeks on a Friday, 10 am to 11:30 am Central Time. To subscribe and receive Zoom links for this seminar, please fill out the following form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdQ98fh58cgeSWzbFe3t77i28FXDck1gYuX9jv_qd4kEf5l_Q/viewform?usp=sf_link For more information, please visit our website: https://sites.google.com/view/05c50online/home. Best, Hermie Monterde (she/her) monterdh@myumanitoba.ca |