LAU hosts annual meeting of the Lebanese Society for Mathematical Sciences

Researchers, faculty and graduate students in the field meet at LAU Beirut to share ideas and research methods.

May 6, 2011

Dr. Rony Touma, assistant professor of mathematics at LAU Beirut and head organizer of the second annual meeting of the Lebanese Society for Mathematical Sciences, addresses participants during the opening ceremony on April 1.

Dr. Thierry Coupez, professor and deputy director of France's Centre for Material Forming, explains "Anisotropic Finite Element for Fluid Dynamics" during a plenary session.

Dr. Samer Habre (far right), associate professor and chairperson of LAU Beirut's Department of Computer Science and Mathematics, introduces the members of the "Current Status and Future of Lebanon's Doctorial Studies in the Mathematical Sciences" panel held on April 2.

Click on any photo above to view all five images.

Scholars of computational sciences and partial differential equations, among other mathematics-related topics, converged upon LAU Beirut for the second annual meeting of the Lebanese Society for Mathematical Sciences on April 1 and 2.

Hosted by the Department of Computer Science and Mathematics at LAU Beirut, the convention brought together faculty and graduate students from universities in Lebanon and other countries in the region, including Iran, Egypt and Iraq.

Of the 105 online registrations received by organizers leading up to the meeting, 78 attended — almost doubling last year’s turnout of 40.

Special guests at the conference included eight renowned mathematicians hailing from Germany, Italy, France, Greece, Egypt and Lebanon, who gave plenary talks with titles like “Numerical Simulations of Ideal MHD Applications in Astrophysics” and “Composition, Iteration and Irreducibility of Polynomials.”

“In this work, we propose to show that adaptive anisotropic meshing based on a posteriori estimation can be used to solve a number of complex simulations,” Dr. Thierry Coupez, professor and deputy director of France’s Centre for Material Forming (CEMEF), wrote in the abstract for his plenary session, “Anisotropic Finite Element for Fluid Dynamics.”

The convention also featured presentations from 22 contributed speakers — participants who were selected by the LSMS Scientific Committee after submitting their abstracts in February. These contributed sessions included “System of Linear and Nonlinear Functional Equations in Non-Archimedean Normed Spaces” and “Third Derivative Multistep Methods for Stiff Systems.”

According to head organizer Dr. Rony Touma, assistant professor of mathematics at LAU Beirut, the meeting took about three months to plan and execute, and was “a great success.”

“People found out about the conference through personal contacts, and word spread to all the universities in Lebanon and beyond,” Touma says. “It was an excellent chance to interact with well-known mathematicians from abroad, who bring with them new ideas and research methods,” he adds.

Dr. Samer Habre, associate professor and chairperson of LAU Beirut’s Department of Computer Science and Mathematics, agrees. “Research collaboration is very important for the mathematics field, especially in a country like Lebanon where the mathematics community is relatively small and research funds are limited,” he says.

“Such collaboration will raise both the research output in Lebanon and the standards of the research being conducted,” he adds.

In addition to the plenary and contributed sessions, a panel discussion on the “Current Status and Future of Lebanon’s Doctorial Studies in the Mathematical Sciences” took place on the second day. Panelists included Dr. Toufic Nasr, Dean of Sciences at St. Joseph University; Dr. Nisreen Ghaddar, chairperson of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the American University of Beirut; and plenary speaker Dr. Thierry Coupez. The panel was moderated by Dr. Kamal Makdisi, former director of the Center for Advanced Mathematical Sciences at AUB.

Panelists briefed the audience about their experiences in the field of doctoral studies in Lebanon, and discussed the difficulties of pursuing joint Ph.D. programs in mathematics in both Lebanon and Europe.

Dr. Fuad Hashwa, dean of the School or Arts and Sciences and professor of microbiology and biotechnology at LAU Byblos, congratulated Habre and Touma on their efforts. “Though I was traveling and couldn’t participate in the panel, I am pleased that it went so well, as this topic is dear to my heart,” he says.

LSMS was established in 2009 and began its activities last year, holding its first annual convention at the Lebanese University.

This year’s meeting at LAU was co-organized with LSMS, LU and CAMS, and was sponsored by the National Council for Scientific Research.

The meeting was preceded by a two-day workshop at LU’s Hadath Campus.

For more information about the meeting, you can check this website and download the book of presentation abstracts.

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