Participants of the Discrete Laplacians workshop. © Katrin Boes / MPI-CBG
The first Discrete Laplacians workshop took place at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics on June 22nd to 25th, assembling 60 participants, including 9 keynote speakers and 22 contributed speakers.
The aim of the Discrete Laplacians workshop was to bring together different research communities that work on the Laplace equations and their many applications, ranging from topology and graph theory to data science and numerical analysis.
Discrete Laplacians appear broadly throughout mathematics and the applied sciences. They are a key concept in connecting continuous methods and theories to their discrete analogs and underlie many of the modern tools in applied mathematics and data analysis, with numerous applications in biology, physics, social sciences, and other disciplines.
The organizers of this workshop included Karel Devriendt (former postdoc in the group of Türkü Özlüm Çelik), Otto Sumray (postdoc in the group of Daniela Egas Santander, Ivo Sbalzarini, and Anne Grapin-Botton), Yu Tian (postdoc in the group of Carl Modes and Anne Grapin-Botton), and Giulio Zucal (postdoc in the group of Türkü Özlüm Çelik and Stephan Grill).
The organizers explain the term “Laplacian” as a reference to the 18th-century French mathematician and scientist Pierre-Simon Laplace. He studied the diffusion of heat and the mathematical properties of the equations that describe this diffusion, which are now called the Laplace equations. In time, these equations turned out to have a much broader applicability beyond just heat diffusion and can be used, for instance, to describe the structure of biological networks or even to analyze the PageRank algorithm that underlies Google’s search engine.
One of the participants said, “The workshop was great because we could have different angles of view on this topic, and the organization was very nice. Looking forward to the next one. Also, Dresden is terrific! I really enjoyed the city center!”
Event website: https://plan.events.mpg.de/event/617/
More upcoming events of the MPI-CBG Math community