Snowbird meeting

I’m currently at the biannual SIAM Dynamical Systems Meeting in Snowbird Utah.  If a massive avalanche were to roll down the mountain and bury the hotel at the bottom, much of applied dynamical systems research in the world would cease to exist.  The meeting has been growing steadily for the past thirty years and has now maxed out the capacity of Snowbird.   The meeting will either eventually have to move to a new venue or restrict the number of speakers. My inclination is to move but I don’t think that is the most popular sentiment.  Thus far, I have found the invited talks to be very interesting.  Climate change seems to be the big theme this year.  Chris Jones and Raymond Pierrehumbert  both gave talks on that topic.  I chaired the session by noted endocrinologist and neuroscientist Stafford Lightman who gave a very well received talk on the dynamics of hormone secretion. Chiara Daraio gave a very impressive talk on manipulating sound propagation with chains of ball bearings.  She’s basically creating the equivalent of nonlinear optics and electronics in acoustics.  My talk this afternoon is on finite size effects in spiking neural networks.  It is similar but not identical to the one I gave in New Orleans in January (see here).  The slides are here.