News roundup: ‘Brittle’ math, a citation in Science & more
Summer reading: An article on Earth geoscience appearing this spring in Science, which is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, discusses key research by our IMS faculty and students participating in a recent math clinic.
The article “Machine learning for data-driven discovery in solid Earth geoscience”—which looks at new ways of better understanding interactions on our planet, from the micro to the planetary level—cites key research conducted by CGU’s 2016-2017 Math Clinic team in collaboration with the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The IMS team (and its Los Alamos partners), the article explains, “used machine learning to characterize the topology of fracture patterns in the subsurface for modeling flow and transport” in the team’s paper, “Machine learning for graph-based representations of three-dimensional discrete fracture networks” which appeared in the journal Computational Geoscience.
The Science citation is the latest example of how IMS’ focus on applied mathematics creates opportunities for students to make important contributions today to real-world situations.
A good example of how the IMS focus on applied mathematics is creating real-world opportunities for students
“I am grateful to have shared that incredible experience that was our Math Clinic and to keep seeing the results along the way,” said computational science doctoral student Manuel Valera, who was that year’s clinic team leader and first author on the paper.
In addition to Valera, the team’s other members (and co-authors) are: IMS Professor Allon Percus; MSFE/Mathematics alumnus Zhengyang Guo; computational science doctoral student Priscilla Kelly: mathematics doctoral student Sean Matz: and computational science doctoral student V. Adrian Cantu. Their Los Alamos collaborators are Jeffrey D. Hyman, Gowri Srinivasan, and Hari S. Viswanathan.
For more about IMS’ math clinics, visit here.
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Poster winners: A cracked wall might be an eyesore, but a crack in the frame of a car or plane can be dangerous. IMS students Yadong Ruan and Zhengming Song, pictured (above) with IMS Professor Allon Percus, translated their team’s recent math clinic work—published in the journal Computational Materials Science as “Learning to fail: Predicting fracture evolution in brittle material models using recurrent graph convolutional neural networks”–into a prize-winning poster at the Southern California Applied Mathematics Symposium.
Ruan and Song beat out poster submissions from USC, UCLA, and Caltech (among others) to take one of the top symposium prizes.
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Strength in Numbers: CGU’s Institute of Mathematical Sciences Professors Marina Chugunova (pictured, right) and Ellis Cumberbatch honored Harvey Mudd Mathematics Professor Weiqing Gu (pictured left) with a special award in recognition of her support of many IMS graduate students. The award presentation preceded a regular meeting of the Claremont Center for the Mathematical Sciences (CCMS) Colloquium, which featured a talk by CMC Mathematics Professor Chiu-Yen Kao. Kao also happens to be a past recipient of IMS’ 5C Faculty Award in recognition of service to the university’s graduate students.
When it comes to mathematics research and collaboration in the Claremont Colleges, faculty collaborations with IMS are a key to our students’ success.
For more about the Institute of Mathematical Sciences at CGU, visit here.