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Petition for the creation of a Rice University SIAM Chapter

This letter was received by SIAM on December 2003.

Posted online: April 6 2004

Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics
Rice University
6100 Main St. - MS 134
Houston, TX 77005-1892
November 24, 2003

Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
3600 University City Science Center
Philadelphia, PA 19404-2688


Dear SIAM Board of Trustees:

As students of the Computational and Applied Mathematics department (CAAM) at Rice University, we are very interested in creating a student chapter of SIAM.

This is a very exciting time for our department. Recently the National Science Foundation’s Division of Mathematical Sciences awarded CAAM and the mathematics and statistics departments at Rice University with a Vertical Integration of Graduate Research and Education (VIGRE) grant. Our department designed a number of PFUGs (Postdoctoral, Faculty, Undergraduate, and Graduate research groups) under the VIGRE grant that will involve increasing numbers of students over the next several years. The purpose of VIGRE and the PFUGs is to engage people at all levels of academia, from professors to undergraduates, in focused areas of important applied research. The structures already in place will provide an outstanding framework for introducing a chapter of SIAM.

The purpose of our SIAM chapter will be to promote the mission goals of SIAM in ways perhaps best suited to students. Graduate students are the pulse of the applied mathematics community, as they are the ones whose research and enthusiasm lead the way for new students entering the field. Having only recently chosen to devote ourselves to the field, perhaps we best can explain why we felt it was a worthwhile choice to those yet undecided on the matter. A SIAM chapter would be an excellent way to extend our excitement for the field to others, and we have several aspirations for such a group.

First and foremost, we will present applied mathematics in an appealing fashion. Graduate students are in the unique position of not only beginning to understand how applied mathematics actually works in the real world, but also of understanding what got them interested in the subject and how to relay those feelings to undergraduates. Appealing to the competitive spirit of the students at Rice and their desire to be challenged, we will hold contests such as Trefethen’s 100-digit challenge. Many of the graduate students got a big kick out of that, and some of us saw numerical analysis as fun for the first time. That’s the kind of thing we want others to experience, especially those who have yet to make a decision as to their futures.


That brings us to a second big goal: giving students options for their futures. We will bring speakers from other departments, universities and, in particular, industry to relate personal stories of how they use mathematics. We are lucky to be in a center of industry. Houston has, for example, a gigantic oil industry that employs many applied mathematicians who could share their experiences with us. We especially hope to request projects that groups of students in the chapter could work on. This would give the students unsurpassed opportunities to get involved with “real work.” Not only would the students get to see applied mathematics in action, but also they also would meet potential employers. Seldom is such an opportunity available except on an individual basis, and then often only by chance, but a SIAM chapter would be particularly suited to organizing such a plan.

We also want to involve ourselves with our peers in the university, giving exposure to our resources and abilities. We wish to see how our research could help them. It is amazing how often we find others waylaid by things in our areas of expertise, detracting from their primary goals. With a little help, we could be of great benefit to them. In addition, by interacting with them, we would get a better feel for how our research is actually used! Our activities and knowledge should be intertwined with, not separated from, other areas of engineering and science at Rice. The PFUGs make great strides toward those goals, but a student chapter of SIAM would provide an excellent forum for the interaction waiting to happen. We would run sessions to coordinate such activities and provide help.

As one can see, we seek to extend the vertical integration prompted by VIGRE to industry and a broader base of undergraduates while also creating horizontal integration among our peers at Rice. With those governing principles in mind, we desire to promote meetings and exchanges with our peers at surrounding programs. The University of Houston and the University of Texas at Austin have excellent applied mathematics programs. The students of our three universities know far too little of each other, and a SIAM chapter could help bind us in an effective research triangle.

In addition, we have secondary goals and activities in mind such as awards for outstanding achievement, which are currently lacking in our department. Recently we disclosed the above ideas to our fellow graduate students and we got a lot of good feedback, ideas, and interest: just take a look at the number of signatures on our petition!
 
We should conclude by mentioning that the Computational and Applied Mathematics department at Rice University will sponsor the organization, and Dr. Mark Embree will be the Faculty Advisor.


Sincerely,