The (false) headline conveys the sporting analog of NSERC’s new policy on Postdoctoral Fellowship Competitions: Effective as of the 2013 competition, you can only apply once to the NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowships (PDF) Program; however, applicants whose first PDF application was submitted prior to the 2013 competition may submit a second application provided they are within the eligibility window. What’s going on? Why would Canada choose to limit the pool of participants competing for advanced training opportunities in science and engineering?

Last week, I had a chance to visit Edinburgh in part to serve as the external examiner on the PhD Thesis (papers) of Tim Candy. Tim is now Dr. Timothy Candy and has an exciting research program to develop as a postdoc at Imperial. It turned out I had lucky timing since my visit overlapped with a visit by Oana Pocovnicu. I had a chance to hear her speak about her recent work on the Gross-Pitaevskii equation.

Investments by governments to support research and development are crucial to economic prosperity, job creation, scientific advancement, and improvements to the future to be inherited by children. How should these investments be selected? Merit review is a competitive process leveraging the expertise of a specially qualified panel to direct investments in research and development. Earmarks are appropriations given to specific recipients or targeted areas, without competition, to satisfy the intent of government.

Budget 2012 continues to shift Canadian federal investment away from basic research toward industrial applied research. This shift is politically expedient: the redirection of funds can be discussed with tantalizing justifications based on job creation, targeted investment, streamlining discovery, and so forth. The shift resonates with a public concerned about frivolous expenditures of dollars collected through taxation. The late Senator from Wisconsin, William Proxmire, advanced this line of political rhetoric by issuing Golden Fleece Awards for science projects he lampooned as unworthy of government investment.

Fifteen1 faculty members from the Department of Mathematics at the University of Toronto submitted proposals to the 2012 NSERC Discovery Grants competition. Of these, one was a first time applicant (En), two (Ga, Ia) applied after a successful appeal of 2011 results, and one (Cd) was an appellant whose appeal was denied but could reapply because the 2011 award was for zero dollars. The first table below shows the 2012 results (in thousands of dollars per year) with 2010, 2011 award amounts for those researchers.

2011 Discovery Grants Competition Aftermath Anomalies in the results of the 2011 NSERC Discovery Grants competition provoked a flurry of activity nearly one year ago. My blog post from April last year reported on surprising results for several of my colleagues at Toronto. An email flurry among Canadian mathematicians culminated in a late April public statement which was eventually signed by 336 Canadian researchers, including 35 Fellows of the Royal Society and 27 Canada Research Chairs.

IAS School of Mathematics   Workshop web page Friday: 2012-03-16 9:00 - 10:00 James Colliander, University of Toronto, “Big frequency cascades in the cubic nonlinear Schroedinger flow on the 2-torus” abstract 10:15 - 11:15 Marcel Guardia, IAS, “Growth of Sobolev norms for the cubic defocusing nonlinear Schroedinger equation in polynomial time” abstract 11:30 - 12:30 Yann Brenier, University of Nice, “Approximate geodesics on groups of volume preserving diffeomorphisms and adhesion dynamics” abstract James Colliander: Big frequency cascades in the cubic nonlinear Schrödinger flow on the 2-torus (chalk talk)

IAS School of Mathematics   Workshop web page Thursday: 2012-03-15 9:00 - 10:00 Peter Topalov, Northeastern University, “Qualitative features of periodic solutions of KdV” abstract 10:15 - 11:15 Jiansheng Geng, Nanjing University, “Invariant tori for the nonlinear lattice one-dimensional Schroedinger equations with real analytic potential” abstract 11:30 - 12:30 Massimiliano Berti, UNINA, “Quasi periodic solutions of Hamiltonian PDEs” abstract 2:30 - 3:30 Ralph Saxton, University of New Orleans, “The generalized inviscid Proudman Johnson equation” abstract 4:30 - 5:30 Dongho Chae, Sungkyunkwan University, “On the blow-up problem for the Euler equations and the Liousville type results in the fluid equations” abstract Peter Topalov: Qualitative features of periodic solutions of KdV I need to do some detailed setup to expose the ideas I want to describe.

IAS School of Mathematics Workshop web page Happy Einstein Birthday! Wednesday: 2012-03-13 9:00 - 10:00 Wilfrid Gangbo, Georgia Institute of Technology, “Lifting absolutely continuous curves from P(Td) to P2(Rd)” abstract 10:15 - 11:15 Jonatan Lenells, Baylor University, “Geometry of diffeomorphism groupos, complete integrability and optimal transport” abstract 11:30 - 12:30 David Ebin, SUNY, “Groups of diffeomorphisms and geodesics on them” abstract 2:30 - 3:30 Susan Friedlander, University of Southern California, “Well / Ill-posedness results for the magneto-geostrophic equations: the importance of being even”.

(Apologies for typos or misquotations…; please help me improve the post. –J. Colliander)   Princeton Math Colloquium 2012-03-14 Presenter: Carlos Kenig University of Chicago Title: A case study for critical non-linear dispersive equations: the energy critical wave equation Abstract: We will discuss recent work on the energy critical wave equation. The issues studied are global existence, scattering, finite time blow-up, universal profiles at blow-up and soliton resolution. This is viewed not as an isolated series of results, but as a way of approaching many similar critical non-linear dispersive equations.