Last week I was at the 10th AIMS Conference on Dynamical Systems, Differential Equations and Applications in Madrid. It was very large, with more than 2700 participants and countless parallel sessions. This kind of situation necessarily generates a somewhat hectic atmosphere and I do not really like going to that type of conference. I have heard the same thing from many other paople. There is nevertheless an advantage, namely the possibility of meeting many people. To do this effectively it is necessary to proceed systematically since it is easy to go for days without seeing a particular person of interest. This aspect was of particular importance for me since I am still at a relatively early stage in the process of entering the field of mathematical biology and I have few contacts there in comparison to my old field of mathematical relativity. In any case, the conference allowed me to meet a lot of interesting people and learn a lot of interesting things.
The first plenary talk, by Charles Fefferman, was on a subject related to a topic I was interested in many years ago. I learned that a lot has happened since I last thought about this. The attempt to model a body of fluid with a free surface leads to considerable mathematical difficulties. When I started working on dynamical models for this kind of situation few people seemed to be interested in proving theorems on the subject. The source of my interest in the subject was the influence of Jürgen Ehlers, who always had a clear vision of what were the important problems. In this way I found myself in the position of a pioneer in a certain research area. Being in that situation has the advantage of not being troubled by strong competition. On the other hand it can also mean that whatever you achieve can be largely ignored and it is not the best way to get wide recognition. Often finishing mathematical research directions gets more credit than starting them. This could no doubt be compensated by suitable advertizing but that was never my strong point. This is a configuration which I have often found myself in and in fact, comparing advantages and disadvantages, I do not feel I need to change it. Coming back to the fluids with free surface, this is now a hot topic and played a prominent role at the conference. When I was working on this the issue of local existence in the case of inviscid fluids was still open. A key step was the work of Sijue Wu on water waves. I learned from the talk of Fefferman that this has been extended in the meantime to global existence for small data. The question which is now the focus of interest is formation of singularities (i.e. breakdown of classical solutions) for large data. Instead of considering the breaking of one wave the idea is to consider two waves which are approaching each other while turning over until they meet. There are already analytical results on parts on this process by Fefferman and collaborators and they plan to extend this to a more global picture by using a computer-assisted proof. Another plenary was by Ingrid Daubechies, who talked about applications of image processing to art history. I must admit that beforehand the theme did not appear very attractive to me but in fact the talk was very entertaining and I am glad I went to hear it.
I gave a talk on my recent work with Juliette Hell on the MAPK cascade in a session organized by Bernold Fiedler and Atsushi Mochizuki. I found the session very interesting and the highlight for me was Mochizuki’s talk on his work with Fiedler. The subject is how much information can be obtained about a network of chemical reactions by observing a few nodes, i.e. by observing a few concentrations. What I find particularly interesting are the direct connections to biological problems. Applied to the gene regulatory network of an ascidian (sea squirt) this theoretical approach suggests that the network known from experimental observations is incomplete and motivates searching for the missing links experimentally. Among the many other talks I heard at the conference, one which I found particularly impressive concerned the analysis of successive MRT pictures of patients with metastases in the lung. The speaker was using numerical simulations with these pictures as input to provide the surgeon with indications which of the many lesions present was likely to develop in a dangerous way and should therefore be removed. One point raised in the talk is that it is not really clear what information about the tissue is really contained in an MRT picture and that this could be an interesting mathematical problem in itself. In fact there was an encouragingly (from my point of view) large number of sessions and other individual talks at the conference on subjects related to mathematical biology.
The conference took place on the campus of the Universidad Autonoma somewhat outside the city. A bonus for me was hearing and seeing my first bee-eater for many years. It was quite far away (flying high) but it gave me real pleasure. I was grateful that the temperatures during the week were very moderate, so that I could enjoy walking through the streets of Madrid in the evening without feeling disturbed by heat or excessive sun.
Hydrobates 