A one-day conference on COMPUTATIONAL MATHEMATICS was held at the University of Strathclyde on 14 September 1992. The conference, which attracted 55 participants, was organised by Dave Sloan of Strathclyde University and Dugald Duncan of Heriot-Watt University. The aim of the meeting was to bring together mathematicians, scientists and engineers who develop numerical techniques or use computer packages to solve mathematical problems. A wide range of methods, algorithms and applications was covered by six lecturers.
Roger Fletcher (Dundee) discussed recent approaches to unconstrained optimization for large dimension problems in which the Hessian matrix is sparse. Iain Duff (RAL, CERFACS, Strathclyde) reviewed recent developments in sparse matrix software, concentrating on the MA48 package from the Harwell Subroutine Library for the solution of sparse unsymmetric systems. David Silvester (UMIST) spoke about Krylov Subspace methods for solving the (Navier-) Stokes equations. Preconditioning and the optimal choice of a 'stabilisation parameter' for improving convergence were considered. Alistair Spence (Bath) dealt with the detection of Hopf bifurcations in large systems arising from fluid mechanics. The advantages gained by Cayley transformation of the generalised eigenvalue problem prior to iterative solution were described, and numerical experiments on large matrices arising from discretisation of problems in fluid mechanics were exhibited. Dave Sloan (Strathclyde) dealt with the pseudospectral solution of differential equations with coordinate singularities such as those which describe situations in spherical or cylindrical geometries. Finally, Douglas Heggie (Edinburgh) discussed the code NBODY5 for handling N-body simulations in astronomy, and illustrated 'tricks' to reduce these massive computations to manageable size.
The meeting was highly successful, and the organisers intend to have a similar meeting at Heriot-Watt University in September 1993.