
This two-day conference will celebrate Steve Smale on his 95th birthday by covering topics relating to some of his contributions to the world of mathematics and to the world of mineral collecting.
Steve’s research is astonishing for its breadth and depth: from differential topology and “turning the sphere inside out”, to dynamical systems and finding the “horseshoe” on the beaches of Rio, to solving the Poincare conjecture for dimensions > 4 leading to the Fields medal, to economics and complexity theory, learning theory, language evolution and flocking, analyzing high dimensional data, and his current obsession with the Kuramoto model to understand the emergence of synchronization, the origins of life itself. Steve is as well known in the mineral collectors’ world as he is in the mathematical world, his mineral collection is described as ranking among the finest in the world. See also: https://sites.google.com/umich.edu/smale90thcelebration/smale-95
Image credit: Still from Stable Chaos, The Smale Horseshoe video by Prof. Robert Ghrist
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Mikhail Belkin (UCSD), Manuel Blum (Carnegie Mellon University), Lenore Blum (Carnegie Mellon University), Graciela Chichilnisky (Columbia University), Leon Chua (UC Berkeley), Felipe Cucker (City University of Hong Kong), James Gimlett (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)), John Guckenheimer (Cornell University), Nancy Kopell (Boston University), Fred Leve (Air Force Office of Scientific Research), Tomaso Poggio (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Charles Pugh (UC Berkeley), Indika Rajapakse (University of Michigan), Michael Shub (CUNY Graduate Center), Steve Smale (UC Berkeley), Amie Wilkinson (University of Chicago), Michael Xuan (UniDT), Lai-Sang Young, (Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University)