The future of AI, artificial organs and other innovative applied math is being taught in Spokane this week

The weather, politics and artificial organs may not seem to have much in common, but researchers at an international applied mathematics convention happening in Spokane would disagree.

Mathematical jargon such as “gradient flow” and “Helmholtz decomposition” may not ring a bell for the average person, but the hundreds of experts invited to the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics convention happening this year in Spokane are right in their comfort zone.

Started in 1952, SIAM is an international community composed of 14,000 members, mainly professors, graduate students and even government and military organizations.

The large convention, being held this week at the Spokane Convention Center, is estimated to generate $1,435,886 to benefit the city, according to Visit Spokane.

Peter Frame, a PhD graduate student at the University of Michigan, described the unique experience as a series of “minisymposiums” that each concentrate on a specific field within mathematics.

Some of the busiest lectures included the mathematics involved in bioartificial organ design, how mathematics is involved in politics, and computational challenges faced in redistricting.

The convention is meant to advance, promote and present research that will benefit industries that use applied mathematics.

Emily Stone, a math professor at the University of Montana, said SIAM is important for technological innovations.

“It allows us to improve and expand all of the numerical applications that people are now a lot more aware of because of AI … this is where the mathematics happens for that,” she said.

Other topics of the convention include quantum computing, AI and its use in cybersecurity, machine learning, fluid dynamics and mechanics.

During coffee breaks, attendees were often heard discussing previous lectures, catching up with colleagues and rendering simulations on their laptops. At one point, a University of Saskatchewan mathematician brought up a slide littered with Greek letters, sharing the complicated formulas used in hydrology and plasma physics.

Frame presented his research on model reduction, which focuses on improving the quality and efficiency of computer simulations revolving around fluids.

“Fluids is actually really big; there’s thousands and thousands of people around the world who work on it,” he said. “If you want to predict what the weather is going to be a week from now, is the heatwave going to end … if you want to answer questions like that, you have to run these very large simulations, which are basically simulating how air flows around the earth, and how it is affected by things like the sun.”

Frame also mentioned how expensive and complicated these simulations are to run, which is why he and so many other attendees at SIAM are working to reduce costs and improve the quality and speed of these simulations.

“People run them on supercomputers, and even so, it takes a long time, and we can’t get the kind of accuracy that we would like,” Frame said. “Another problem is that we cannot run as many of them as we would like, so there is a big need to speed these simulations up.”