Department hosts International Constructive Functions 2025 Conference
The Vanderbilt University Department of Mathematics hosted the international Constructive Functions 2025 which was held on the university campus May 19-22. The conference was in large part a recognition of the mathematical work of Distinguished Professor Edward Saff, as well as a celebration of his 80th birthday. The local organizers of the conference were Liudmyla Kryvonos, Ryan Matzke, and Doug Hardin.
The conference attracted approximately 200 participants from 24 countries, making it the largest conference in the series of 37 Shanks conferences hosted by the Department of Mathematics. It was supported by the Shanks Endowment and the National Science Foundation. The welcome reception was sponsored in part by Springer Nature publishers.
In addition to 10 plenary talks, there were 17 mini-symposia, and 6 parallel sessions with topics that included Coulomb gases, orthogonal polynomials, complex analysis, approximation theory, frame theory, and inverse problems.
The conference featured the distinguished Shanks Lecturer, Professor Doron Lubinsky from Georgia Tech. It also celebrated the 40th anniversary of the founding of the high-ranking research journal Constructive Approximation, co-founded by Ed Saff and based at Vanderbilt.
The annual Shanks conference is supported by the Shanks Lectureship Endowment, which was made to honor Olivia and Baylis Shanks. E. Baylis Shanks was chair of the department from 1956 to 1969 and was faculty from 1947 to 1979. As chair, Baylis initiated our graduate program in Mathematics and advised its first two graduates, among his many other accomplishments.
The Plenary Talks and Titles
Peter Dragnev (Purdue University – Fort Wayne)
“My Journey Through Mathematics with Ed Saff”
Arno Kuijlaars (KU Leuven)
“Equilibrium Measures on a Riemann Surface and Random Tilings”
Ana Loureiro (University of Kent)
“A free journey from higher order recurrence relations to the zero distribution”
Doron Lubinsky (Georgia Institute of Technology), Shanks Lecturer
“A Selection of Ed’s Saffires”
Andrei Martínez-Finkelshtein (Baylor University)
“The Many Facets of Iterated Differentiation”
Ana Matos (Universite de Lille)
“Solving an Equilibrium problem using Rational Approximation”
Jill Pipher (Brown University)
“Mathematical Ideas in Lattice Based Public Key Cryptography”
Ian Sloan (University of New South Wales)
“QMC designs – cubature on the sphere without polynomial exactness”
Eitan Tadmor (University of Maryland)
“Swarm-Based Gradient Descent Method for Non-Convex Optimization”
Nick Trefethen (Harvard University)
“AAA Approximation and Potential Theory”
The Minisymposia
Inverse Source Problems and Approximations.
Energy Minimization, Discrepancy, and Potential Theory.
Spherical Codes and Designs
Not Only Polynomials: New Perspectives on Multivariate Approximation
Advances on Coulomb and Riesz Gases
Constructive Approximation and Equilibrium Problems – Related Topics and Applications
Applied and Computational Complex Analysis
Kernel Methods for Partial Differential Equations on Manifolds
Extremal Problems and Spectral Theory of Soliton Gases for Integrable Systems
Symmetric Subspace Configurations
Orthogonal Polynomials and Applications
Functions of a Complex Variable
Multivariate Splines and their Applications
Approximation Theory, PDE and Applications
Orthogonal Polynomials, Integrable Systems, and Riemann-Hilbert Problems