Monthly Archives: March 2011

Providence Geeks video podcast: Jan Hesthaven of ICERM

At the March 2011 Providence Geek Dinner, Jan Hesthaven of ICERM (Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics) gave us an overview of the institute’s mission, explained some ways that they’ll be reaching out to the community, and helped us understand what this all means for the geek community. I caught up with Jan after his talk and we recorded this short video. [Video link]

March Geeks Dinner, Wed. 16th 5:30 – 8:30pm featuring ICERM

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Wednesday, March 16th, 2011, 5:30 – 8pm
AS220, 115 Empire Street, Providence, RI
FREE (buy your own food and drink – it’s cheap)

The March Geek Dinner this coming Wednesday is going to be all kinds of awesome.

To my mind ICERM is the biggest – and yet, still largely unknown  - local Geek news of the year. As Senator Reed recently said, ICERM will,“make Providence an important hub for the study of computational mathematics.” (Not an exaggeration.)

This past summer Brown won a _highly_ competitive $15.5 million award from the National Science Foundation to form a national mathematics research institute — one of only eight in the nation — where scholars from around the world will come to explore the intersection between computation and mathematics.

ICERM (Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics) will officially open this fall in the renovated top 2 (amazing) floors of 121 South Main Street.
Hot topics that the ICERM community is expected to tackle include cryptography, cybersecurity, personalized medicine, search engines and social networks.
In addition, ICERM has partnered with Google, IBM, and Microsoft, so that ideas can flow and result in new ventures. (No, I’m not making any of this up.)

This Wednesday, Jan Hesthaven – Brown Professor of Applied Math, Director for the Center for Computation and Visualization, Associate Director of ICERM, and all-around-brilliant-good-guy will give an overview of ICERM, including ways that the Institute and the local Geek community might work together.

Don’t miss this!

Please RSVP at Facebook – and while you’re there please join our Facebook group. And if you want to join our very-low-volume email announcement send an email to Jack Templin, jtemplin@gmail.com with your name and affiliation.

As always, for first-timers here are the details on the Geek Dinners:

  • The event itself is FREE! Beverages and food are for sale at AS220′s excellent bar and restaurant.
  • Doors open at 5:30pm. Socializing, eating and drinking up until the 30 min presentation/q&a around 6:30pm. Afterwards, back to socializing, eating, drinking…
  • It’s totally casual. Wear whatever, bring whoever, arrive and take off whenever! And don’t worry about eating or not – come famished or full – eating is optional, and frankly, the least of the festivities (that’s not say the food isn’t good – it’s actually great)
  • Topics of conversation will vary as they will at any gathering of geeks, but many of us will be talking about AJAX, mash-ups, start-ups, new devices, innovative business models, interaction design, social computing, digital art, web services, etc. etc. etc.
  • There is Wi-Fi so bring your connected device of choice.