Electronic Journal of Differential Equations: Conference 15, 2007.

Proceedings of the Sixth Mississippi State - UAB Conference on Differential Equations and Computational Simulations, Starkville, Mississippi, USA. May 13-14, 2005.

Foreword
Mathematical modeling, analysis, and computational simulations have fundamentally changed how complex phenomena in sciences and engineering are analyzed and investigated. Gone are the days when mathematicians could work individually in closed offices using pencil and paper to solve simple model problems. A successful effort in modeling, analysis, and simulations for real-world applications now requires a truly interdisciplinary collaboration among mathematicians, computer scientists, and researchers in various scientific and engineering fields. To provide a joint forum for mathematicians, scientists, and engineers from industries, federal laboratories, and academia to exchange ideas and present the latest research progresses, a conference series on Differential Equations and Computational Simulations was started in 1993 by the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and the NSF Engineering Research Center at Mississippi State University. An overall goal of this conference series is to promote interdisciplinary research collaborations and education effort in mathematical and computational analyses of differential equations with real-world applications.

The first five Mississippi State Conferences on Differential Equations and Computational Simulations were held March 19-20, 1993, April 7-8, 1995, May 16-17, 1997, May 21 - 22, 1999, and May 18 - 19, 2001. Special issues of the Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computation (65:1-3, 1994 and 89:1-3, 1998) and of the Electronic Journal of Differential Equations (Conference-01, 1997, Conference-03, 1999, and Conference-10, 2003) were published as the conference proceedings for refereed papers presented at these conferences.

The sixth conference in this highly successful conference series took place in Starkville, Mississippi, May 13-14, 2005. The conference was organized jointly by Mississippi State University and University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), and was renamed as Mississippi State - UAB Conference on Differential Equations and Computational Simulations. This conference was dedicated to Louis Nirenberg in celebration of his 80th birthday, to Klaus Schmitt in celebration of his 65th birthday, and to their outstanding contributions in mathematics. Conference highlights included special sessions dedicated to Louis Nirenberg and Klaus Schmitt, a banquet lecture titled "Louis Nirenberg and Klaus Schmitt: The Joy of Differential Equations" by Jean Mawhin, University of Catholique de Louvain-Belgium, a special presentation by Mary Ann Horn of NSF on the Funding Opportunities in the Mathematical Sciences at the NSF, and eight invited principal lectures:

• Margaret Cheney, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Synthetic Aperture Radar
• Lawrence DeLucas, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Nano-Crystallization, Balanced Crystallization Screens and the Use of Predictive Algorithms
• Thomas Yizhao Hou, California Institute of Technology, Multiscale Modeling and Computation of Flow in Heterogeneous Media
• Mark Lewis, University of Alberta, Linear Predictability, Population Spread and Persistence
• Fang-Hua Lin, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Superfluid Passing an Obstacle
• Robert Meakin, U. S. Army, NASA Ames Research Center, Multiple Body Proximate Flight Simulation Methods
• Louis Nirenberg, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, The Distance Function to the Boundary and Hamilton-Jacobi Equations
• Klaus Schmitt, University of Utah, Revisiting the Method of Sub- and Supersolutions

In addition, a total of 90 contributed papers were presented at the conference and 150 participants registered for the conference. The conference participants came from Canada, Czechoslovakia, France, India, Indonesia, Korea, Mexico, Thailand, and the United States.

The papers in this special issue of EJDE represent a broad range of research in the following multidisciplinary areas:

1. Mathematical Analysis and Bifurcation Theory - Ordinary and partial differential equations involving reaction-diffusion, stability, and existence and uniqueness, error estimates, and representation theories associated with initial and boundary value problems.
2. Computational/Numerical Techniques - Numerical methods for solving Navier-Stokes equation involving moving interface problems, modeling and algorithm development, and their computational experiments on image denoising and edge enhancement, photon-distribution effect, curvature flows, and the direction of pitchfork bifurcation. Issues in adaptive mesh refinement technique and an extension of Cayley's problem were also presented.
3. Computational Biology - Computational methods for bacterial biofilms, predator-prey models, and ratio-dependent models of consumer- resource dynamics.

We would like to thank the participants and principal speakers for their valuable contributions to the success of the conference and publication of the proceedings. We gratefully acknowledge the support provided by the National Science Foundation and the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at University of Minnesota. The support from the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Engineering, the Office of Research, and the faculty and staff of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and the High Performance Computing Collaboratory (formerly NSF Engineering Research Center) at Mississippi State University is also acknowledged. We also greatly appreciate the Electronic Journal of Differential Equations, Atlas Conferences, and the Cypress Semiconductor for their support. Last but not least, we appreciate very much the diligence and responsiveness of the reviewers of the manuscripts that made the publication of this proceedings possible.

Special Issue Editors:
Main Editors: John Graef (University of Tennessee at Chatanooga), Hyeona Lim (Mississippi State University), Ratnasingham Shivaji (Mississippi State University), Bharat Soni (University of Alabama at Birmingham), Jianping Zhu (University of Texas at Arlington).
Associate Editors: Clarence Burg (Mississippi State University), Steve Cantrell (University of Miami), Alfonso Castro (Harvey Mudd College), Maya Chhetri (University of North Carolina at Greensboro) Chris Cosner (University of Miami), Hai Dang (Mississippi State University), Seongjai Kim (Mississippi State University), Roy Koomullil (University of Alabama at Birmingham), Mark Novotny (Mississippi State University), Pablo Padilla (UNAM - Math, Mexico), Xiangsheng Xu (Mississippi State University).

Go to the Proceedings of Conferences: Electron. J. Diff. Eqns.