Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics

Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics
Name	Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics
Established	2011
Location	Providence, Rhode Island
Affiliations	Brown University

Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics is a research institute based in Providence associated with Brown University, focused on computational and experimental approaches to mathematical problems. The institute hosts programs that bring together researchers from universities, national laboratories, and industry partners to address challenges in numerical analysis, topology, algebra, and applied mathematics. It organizes workshops, summer programs, and collaborative projects that intersect with computer science, physics, and engineering.

History

The institute was founded in 2011 with support from Brown University, the National Science Foundation, and regional stakeholders, drawing on precedents set by Institute for Advanced Study, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, MSRI Summer Graduate School, and SIMONS Foundation initiatives. Early leadership included scholars linked to Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, and University of Chicago. Initial programs referenced methodologies from John von Neumann-era computing, developments at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and algorithmic advances from IBM Research. Growth in the 2010s mirrored trends seen at National Institute of Standards and Technology, Argonne National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in computational mathematics. Funding and collaborations involved agencies such as the National Science Foundation Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences and foundations including Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Mission and Research Programs

The institute's mission emphasizes rigorous computational experimentation, reproducible computation, and cross-disciplinary collaboration, aligning with priorities championed by National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and Department of Energy research agendas. Research programs span numerical linear algebra, high-performance computing, computational topology, algebraic geometry, optimization, and uncertainty quantification, building on work from researchers affiliated with Fields Medal-associated groups and recipients linked to Abel Prize and Clay Mathematics Institute programs. Projects often involve algorithmic development influenced by Donald Knuth, Stephen Cook, Leslie Lamport, John Hopcroft, and methods used in Large Hadron Collider data analysis. Programs include thematic workshops on spectral methods, finite element analysis, computational number theory, and machine learning applications drawing on techniques from Andrew Ng and Yann LeCun-inspired research groups.

Facilities and Infrastructure

Located on a campus near Providence, the institute maintains seminar spaces, computational clusters, and collaborative offices similar to facilities at Perimeter Institute and Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. Hardware resources include access to high-performance computing systems comparable to clusters at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, GPU nodes akin to those used by NVIDIA Research, and cloud collaborations with providers similar to Amazon Web Services research programs. The building hosts blackboard rooms, lecture halls, and data repositories paralleling infrastructures at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and CERN collaborative centers. Software stacks and reproducibility platforms reflect practices from GitHub, Jupyter Notebook, MPI, and numerical libraries inspired by LAPACK and BLAS.

Education and Outreach

Educational activities include workshops for graduate students, postdoctoral fellowships, summer schools, and teacher training modeled on programs at Mathematical Association of America, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Association for Women in Mathematics, and American Mathematical Society. Outreach initiatives partner with local schools, community colleges, and statewide programs like RI School of Design collaborations and regional STEM consortia. The institute sponsors tutorials, public lectures, and visiting scholar programs featuring speakers from Princeton University, Yale University, Columbia University, Cornell University, and New York University as well as industry experts from Google Research, Microsoft Research, and IBM Watson.

Collaborations and Partnerships

Collaborative networks include alliances with Brown University departments, national laboratories such as Argonne National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and international centers like Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques and Max Planck Institute for Mathematics. Partnerships extend to corporations involved in scientific computing, including entities comparable to Intel Corporation, AMD, NVIDIA, and research labs such as Facebook AI Research. The institute participates in multi-institution grants coordinated with DARPA-funded projects, international consortia linked to European Research Council awards, and joint appointments with mathematics departments at Duke University, University of Michigan, and University of California, Los Angeles.

Notable Events and Achievements

Notable events include inaugural workshops that convened experts from Fields Medal-winning research groups, interdisciplinary programs that influenced methods used in National Weather Service forecasting and computational biology projects related to National Institutes of Health datasets, and collaborative contributions to open-source numerical libraries akin to PETSc and SUNDIALS. Achievements encompass fostering research leading to publications in journals like Annals of Mathematics, Journal of the American Mathematical Society, Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, and SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis, and training researchers who have joined faculties at institutions such as Brown University, MIT, Harvard University, UC Berkeley, and Princeton University.

Category:Mathematical research institutes