Fields Notes 17:3 | Page 17

Research Program F USRP in the G lobe and Mail! https://goo.gl/dLUjED Astrid Astrid Olave came to Fields all the way from Colombia, where she studies at the International University of Colombia in Bogota. Olave has been good at math for as long as she can remember, but it was in University that she really fell in love. “Math is in every place – in biology, in mechanics, in physics, in whatever you want – math is there.” At Fields, Olave worked on combinatorial optimization with Professor Konstantinos Georgiou from Ryerson University, where, not being used to the late summer sunsets, she sometimes worked till well into the night. Her favourite part of being at Fields was the ability to focus on research and to see the connections between applied mathematics and industry. The w ho le g ro up Asad Asad Chaudhary was one of the oldest undergraduates in the program this year – having just finished his undergraduate degree in mathematics at Imperial College London he is all set to start his PhD at Oxford in the fall. Chaudhary’s main area of interest is partial different equations (PDEs). “The thing that drew me to PDEs was this interplay between analysis and geometry,” he explains. As part of Project 2, Chaudhary studied sound propagation through laminated structures, either attempting to design a structure with certain acoustic properties, or determining the make-up of a structure given an input sound and the resulting echo. The project was supervised by Peter Gibson from York University. For Chaudhary the FUSRP offered a fresh perspective. “Everybody has different backgrounds: there are things that I’ve learned that others haven’t and things the others learned that I haven’t. And even if you learned the same things you may have been taught in different ways.” 17