The AMS held their Fall Central Sectional Meeting on Loyola's Lakeshore Campus, from Friday, October 2nd to Sunday, October 4th.

 

Each year, the AMS holds eight sectional meetings: one in the Fall and one in the Spring in each of four geographical regions—the Western, Central, Eastern and Southeastern Sections. The meetings usually run for two days, with four invited addresses and as many special sessions as time and space allow. These AMS sectional meetings offer opportunities for mathematicians to present their latest work, as well as see what others are doing. In doing so, the meeting fosters new knowledge and collaboration between mathematicians to solve new problems.

 

At Loyola, there were a total of 643 speakers giving 664 lectures. The topics covered all areas/disciplines in mathematics, from Association Schemes, Algebraic Combinatorics, and Algebraic Statistics through the Langlands Program and Model Theory to Variational Analysis and Quantitative Finance. There were 38 special sessions in all, with eight being co-organized by 10 Loyola faculty members: Barron, Bocea, Giaquinto, Goebel, Huffman, Jensen, S. Jordan, Lauve, Peters, and Tingley. There were many presenters from farther afield as well, including presenters from top programs as Berkely, Stanford and Harvard. In total, there were 837 attendees, which is an all-time record for sectional meetings. These mathematicians hailed from all over the country and even some from abroad.

 

In addition to the lectures and special sessions, Loyola was honored to host the Erdős Memorial Lecture, which is a lecture presented once a year by some of the leading minds of mathematics. This year, we had Dean Regan introduce the speaker for the Erdös lecture Peter Sarnak, who is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and a multiple-prize-winning number theorist. Take a look at pictures from the event below.