Seminar: How to Solve Hard Problems by Making Them Harder

Abstract

This talk will explore the nature of linear vs. nonlinear, discrete vs. continuous, deterministic vs. nondeterministic, and our intuition about those concepts, using some fundamental (but still open) computational problems: the linear complementarity problem and multidimensional numerical integration.

Bio

Layne T. Watson received the B.A. degree (magna cum laude) in psychology and mathematics from the University of Evansville, Indiana, in 1969, and the Ph.D. degree in mathematics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1974.  He  has worked for USNAD Crane, Sandia National Laboratories, and General Motors Research Laboratories and served on the  faculties of the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and University of Notre Dame.  He is currently a member of the faculty of health sciences, and professor of computer science, mathematics, and aerospace and ocean engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.  He has served as senior editor of Applied Mathematics and Computation, and associate editor of Computational Optimization and Applications, Evolutionary Optimization,  Engineering Computations, and the International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications.  He is a Life  Fellow of the IEEE, a fellow of the National Institute of Aerospace, and of the International Society of Intelligent  Biological Medicine.  He has published well over 330 refereed journal articles and 240 refereed conference papers.  His research interests include fluid dynamics, solid mechanics, numerical analysis, optimization, parallel computation, mathematical software, image processing, bioinformatics, and machine learning.