Thanks to NSF funding through a CAREER grant to Daniel Lieman, the department hosted its third annual Algebra Weekend in October 1999. The focus of the conference was cryptography. In addition to several contributed talks, the plenary speakers and their affiliations at that time included: Dan Boneh, Stanford University; Cynthia Dwork, IBM Almaden Research Lab; Matt Franklin, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center; Igor Shparlinski, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia; and Rebecca Wright, AT&T Research Labs.
Thanks in part to mission enhancement funding, the department developed a mathematical finance program. To celebrate this new direction, the department hosted a May 2000 conference on "Mathematical Finance." Organized by MU's Stamatis Dostoglou and Stathis Tompaidis of the University of Texas business school, the event featured a series of three lectures by Marco Avellaneda, professor at the Courant Institute.
Eleven other distinguished researchers presented lectures on current methods and problems of financial mathematics: Claudio Albanese, Toronto; Gregory Brown, University of North Carolina; Peter Carr, Bank of America Securities; Patrick Jaillet, University of Texas at Austin; Mark Lowenstein, Washington University; Dilip Madan, University of Maryland; Kristian Risgaard Miltersen, Odense University, Denmark; Stanley Pliska, University of Illinois-Chicago; Luis Seco, University of Toronto; Ronnie Sircar, University of Michigan; and Allanus Tsoi, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
More than 100 researchers from three continents came to Columbia for the third annual Midwest Algebraic Geometry Conference in October 1999, organized by Dale Cutkosky, Dan Edidin and Qi Zhang. The MU Math department and the University of Missouri Research Board were sponsors.
The following speakers presented plenary talks: Sheeram Abhyankar, Purdue University; Valery Alexeev, Georgia; Mel Hochster, Michigan; Yujiro Kawamata, Tokyo; Venkatramani Lakshmibai, Northeastern; Rob Lazersfeld, Michigan; and Marc Levine, Northeastern. In addition, there were about 40 shorter cornmunications.
The University of Notre Dame hosted the conference in 1997 and Northwestern University in 1998.
The ninth annual Midwest Geometry Conference in November 1999 featured four sessions:
"Geometrical Methods in the Topology of Low-Dimensional Manifolds," with plenary speakers Marc Culler of the University of IIIinois-Chicago, and Tom Mrowka, MIT; "Lorentzian Geometry and Relativity," with plenary speakers Matthew Choptulk of the University of Texas, Greg Galloway of the University of Miami and Vincent Moncrief of Yale University; "Recent Developments in Complex Algebraic Geometry," with plenary speakers Yongbin Ruan of the University of Wisconsin and Yom-Tong Siu of Harvard University; and "Quantum Fields and Geometry," with plenary speakers James Hartle of the University of California-Santa Barbara and Robert Wald of the University of Chicago.
A multi-university NSF grant and the MU mathematics department funded the event, which was organized by MU faculty John Beem, Stamatis Dostoglou, Dan Edidin, Adam Helfer, Bahram Mashhoon, Jan Segert, Shuguang Wang and Qi Zhang, and Carl Bender of Washington University.
In addition to the plenary lectures there were about 20 contributed talks.
