Arieh Iserles

Normally, I live in the town of Lawrence, Kansas on the Kaw River. This is a peaceful town with a violent past. (Lawrence was burned and sacked twice within a decade of its founding at about the time of the Civil War.) Lawrence's most famous resident, William S. Burroughs, is, appropriately, a peaceful person with a violent past. An entire neighborhood of Lawrence is on the historic register. The downtown, one of the best preserved small city main streets in the US, is thriving lately with a boom in population and industry, and there are many new shops, restaurants, cafes, an excellent bakery, and even a trio of breweries.

The University of Kansas has one of the most beautiful campuses in the world. Of course it is not quite as magnificent as Cambridge, but it might catch up in 900 years or so. The math department has a history of being very pure. Solomon Lefschetz did some of his best work as a junior faculty member in the period 1914-1921. Lately, there has been a great deal of improvement in applied mathematics, with several new hires in areas such as numerical analysis and chaotic dynamics.

Recently, math department faculty, myself included, have been teaming up with faculty of chemistry, physics and engineering to do pioneering work (well, work that we hope is pioneering) of a highly interdisciplinary nature. We have two bits of infrastructure to support these interactions, the Kansas Institute for Theoretical and Computional Science (KITCS) and the Kansas Center for Advanced Scientific Computing (KCASC); they are funded by NSF and the State of Kansas. KITCS/KCASC provide opportunities for students and faculty to interact, and to host joint seminars, workshops and conferences.

This year, the mathematics department will install a new scientific computing laboratory, including a 4 CPU SGI Onyx R10000 system, and 5 smaller workstations. The KCASC will also purchase a