The success of the proposals to this scheme will allow us to grow our international links with Latin America and expand some of the already very successful initiatives that are running alongside SAMBa to departments outside of Mathematical Sciences.
Bath-Brazil mathematical sciences partnership
Paul Milewski, in collaboration with Jonathan Evans and Jonathan Dawes was awarded £15,000 to fund a Bath-Brazil colloquium to be hosted at Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada (IMPA), in Rio de Janeiro, in January 2017.
Over the last three years there has been a significant increase in the number of collaborations between Bath staff in the Department of Mathematical Sciences and counterparts in Brazil, particularly at IMPA, the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), and Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP).
These collaborations have spanned several mathematical themes: probability, applied mathematics, dynamical systems, and analysis, and included the Brazilian Study Groups with Industry (initiated in 2015). Academics from Brazilian institutions have visited the department of Mathematical Sciences and participated in SAMBa's Integrative Think Tanks.
The Bath-Brazil Colloquium will bring together these individual collaborations and help grow them into a more sustainable long-term structure.
Building on BUC: funding for further workshops
Gavin Shaddick and Andreas Kyprianou successfully applied for £15,000 of funding to continue the thriving BUC initiative working with two Mexican institutions, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and Centro de Investigación en Matemáticas (CIMAT).
The BUC (Bath-UNAM-CIMAT) initiative has already delivered four successful workshops, with the fifth scheduled for September. BUC workshops are centered on PhD students and a major feature at each event is the student symposia. This provides a showcase for students and young researchers from each of the partner institutions to present their work.
The BUC workshops that have taken place have already delivered significant returns in terms of new joint research projects, grant applications, student exchange and PhD applications to SAMBa. It is expected that the next workshops, which will be supported by this funding, will be equally as successful and will lead to a deep, long-lasting, and fruitful relationship with partners in Mexico.
Funding for the next four BUCs will allow the workshop series to expand further in scope and in size. New events will focus on analysis, and continuum modelling, as well as statistics and probability, and will bring in co-applicants Apala Majumdar, Kirill Cherednichenko and Paul Milewski. There is the opportunity to bring in other departments across the University to these workshops and we also hope that the concept can be expanded to other SAMBa partners in Latin America, including Brazilian institutions and the Centre for Mathematical Modelling in Chile.