Renowned Mathematician Wolfgang Dahmen to speak at Vanderbilt University’s International Conference on Approximation Theory and Beyond
Distinguished mathematician Wolfgang Dahmen will be the featured speaker at the upcoming International Conference on Approximation Theory and Beyond May 15-18 at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Dahmen is a professor at both the University of South Carolina and RWTH Aachen University, and his research focuses on approximation theory, numerical partial differential equations, statistical learning, and data science.
Dr. Dahmen will deliver the 35th Annual Shanks Lecture on Tuesday, May 16, at 3:40 pm.. in 103 Wilson Hall. His lecture, titled “High-Dimensional Approximation, Compositional Sparsity, and Deep Neural Networks,” will explore the challenge of recovering or approximating functions of many variables, a task that is necessary in various application contexts, including machine learning, uncertainty quantification, and data assimilation. Dahmen will discuss recent findings related to the Curse of Dimensionality, which is an obstacle to effective approximation due to an exponential dependence of “recovery cost” on spatial dimension.
Dr. Dahmen’s lecture is one of many talks at the conference related to data science and machine learning. Follow this link to read abstracts of the other talks. You can see the full schedule of each talk planned for the four-day conference here. No registration is required. However, it is requested you email Mathematics Professor Mike Neamtu if you plan to attend.
The conference will provide an opportunity to celebrate Professor Larry Schumaker’s recent 80th birthday and his many outstanding contributions to approximation theory. It will also honor the 35th anniversary of the journal Constructive Approximation.
The conference aims to bring together researchers from diverse areas of approximation theory, including both pure and applied mathematicians from all around the world. The event especially encourages the participation of early-career researchers, including students, as well as women and underrepresented minorities. The Department of Mathematics at Vanderbilt University organizes the Shanks Lecture Series annually to honor Baylis and Olivia Shanks. The late Professor Baylis Shanks was the chairman of the department from 1955 to 1969. The conference is an occasion to celebrate the field of approximation theory at large, highlight its past achievements, and explore its future.