Conference: May Midwestern Microlocal Meeting 2026

This award supports participation in the fourth May Midwestern Microlocal Meeting, held May 9-10, 2026 in Chicago. The propagation of waves, a ubiquitous phenomenon in the physical world, is described by a variety of interrelated partial differential equations. The study of the solutions of the equations of wave motion has been advanced by the use of the techniques of microlocal analysis, which allow mathematicians to make precise the notion of the distribution of a wave in both position and direction, and to study its evolution from this perspective. Applications of microlocal analysis in science and engineering include phenomena on both large and small scales, such as propagation of gravitational waves in general relativity, of seismic waves in the Earth, and the relationship between the wavelike motion of quantum particles and the motion of point particles that approximate them in Newtonian physics. The May Midwestern Microlocal Meeting is one in a series of meetings designed to disseminate recent progress in this field and to train students and postdoctoral researchers in its techniques.

The series of May Midwestern Microlocal Meetings was started in 2015. The meetings bring together experts in microlocal analysis and related fields, graduate students, and recent PhDs to exchange ideas and possibly begin new collaborations. This project partly covers the travel expenses of invited speakers and of graduate students and junior mathematicians who will be in attendance. The field of microlocal analysis started in the 1970s with the work of Kohn and Nirenberg, Maslov, Hörmander, Duistermaat and Hörmander, Duistermaat and Guillemin, mostly to construct parametrices of elliptic and hyperbolic problems and to study the spectra of pseudodifferential operators on compact manifolds and manifolds with boundary. This field has grown tremendously, and it has found applications in many areas of pure and applied mathematics including dynamical systems, general relativity, medical imaging, and oil prospecting. There will be seven lectures given by invited speakers. The areas of focus will include spectral and scattering theory, general relativity, inverse problems, and generalized Radon and X-ray transforms. The titles and abstracts of the talks will be posted on the conference homepage and will remain there for years to come. Information about the conference is at https://www.math.purdue.edu/~kdatchev/MMMM2026/.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Award Number: 2611150
Principal Investigator: Jared Wunsch
Funds Obligated: $9,600
State: IL