Keynote Speaker

2013 SIAM Conference Keynote Presentation

Speaker:
Loren Cobb, Department of Mathematics, University of Colorado Denver

Title:
Mathematics of Society and its Dysfunctions

Abstract:
Social problems are not the traditional domain of applied mathematics, yet remarkable progress is being made, mostly by physicists. Even most mathematicians are unaware of the impending explosion of new ideas and new mathematics for the social sciences. As recently as 25 years ago this endeavor simply did not exist. Over the past 20 years I have worked as a free-lance applied mathematician with a dozen different countries on their toughest social problems: economic (poverty, underground economies), criminal (drug trafficking, juvenile gangs), political (corruption, ethnic relations, reform of the poice), and demographic (refugees, migration, population growth). In every case there has been wonderful mathematics to be discovered, and nontrivial questions of stability and change to ponder. This is a field in its infancy, where new ideas are welcomed like water for a man dying of thirst.