Event Details:
Location
This event is open to:
This seminar series highlights recent developments in numerical linear algebra and numerical optimization. The goal is to bring together scientists from different theoretical and application areas to solve complex scientific computing problems. Presenters include academic researchers and industrial R&D staff.
Guest Speaker: Dr. Joseph Grcar
How to Count Polar Bears
Over three decades ago, Stirling and Derocher (Arctic, 1993) proposed that an early indicator of climate warming would be a decline in the abundance of polar bears. This talk reviews the reasoning behind their proposal. Sophisticated methods have been used to estimate bear populations in the interim. Recent statistical estimates of polar bear populations do not support the linkage, at least at the present rates of climate change in the Arctic, because bear populations appear to be stable. The population estimates are made with the methodology of line transect sampling. Although transect sampling has been used to measure wild populations for perhaps a century, it has undergone greater formalism and automation through standardized software that has been available since 2010.
Speaker Bio: Joseph Grcar now conducts research on the history of computing. His 2010 article in Historia Mathematica identified Newton as the inventor of "Gaussian" elimination in Europe. Grcar was a computational scientist at national laboratories in Livermore and in Berkeley for many years, where he was one of the original developers of the commercialized Chemkin software for chemical kinetics. He specialized in calculations for reacting fluid flows, combustion, and linear algebra in which he originated the partial reorthogonalization technique for Lanczos methods. A matrix and a polynomial are named after him. Grcar received a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Illinois in 1980.