ICMC Summer Meeting in Differential Equations - 2006 Chapter

Commemorative Edition of 10 years in tribute to Daniel Henry

February 20-22


Written by A. N. Carvalho and H. M. Rodrigues

Organizing Committee:  A. N. Carvalho, A. L. Pereira, H. M. Rodrigues and S. H. M. Soares
Scientific Committee:  A. N. Carvalho, H. M. Rodrigues, J. K. Hale and K. Mischaikow



The Instituto de Ciências Matemáticas e de Computação (ICMC) is an institute of the Universidade de São Paulo at São Carlos dedicated to higher education and research on Mathematics and Computer Science. São Carlos is a city with 210.000 inhabitants, year long nice weather, average temperatures ranging from 16 to 29,6 degrees centigrades and average altitude of 856 meters. It is located in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. The ICMC Summer Meeting in Differential Equations is held every year at the Department of Mathematics of the ICMC. It is intended to promote interaction among researchers working on differential equations at nearby institutions.


    This meeting always happens during the summer vacation time on the week that preceeds carnival. This year's meeting was a commemorative edition of 10 years and was held as posthumous tribute to Dan Henry in recognition to the great scientific influence that his work has had on all of us working with infinite dimensional dynamical systems in Brazil.


Here is a picture with many of the participants in the gardens of the ICMC. The weather was fabulous as always.

    The program of the conference consisted of 15 plenary lectures and 21 additional lectures requiring parallel sections in the afternoons of the first two days (see abstracts). The number of participants was close to 80 people exceeding by much our expectation. Besides Brazilian participants from all over the country, many researchers from the United States, Spain, Portugal and Poland attended the meeting. We believe that so many people were here for the meeting due to the posthumous tribute to Dan Henry. The organizers were very happy with this surprisingly high number of participants and with the quality of the lectures presented.  The lectures were inspiring to many of us. In general, the topics covered by the lectures involved qualitative aspects of solutions of nonlinear differential equations such as 1) existence, multiplicity and concentration of positive solutions of elliptic systems; 2) blow up, global existence and patterns for parabolic problems with nonlinear boundary conditions; 3)  attractors;  4) existence, stability and numerical schemes for traveling waves; 5) bifurcation of stationary solutions;  6) lattice dynamical systems; 7) symmetry of minimizers in variational problems; 8) vortex dynamics; 9) singularly perturbed delay equations; 10) soliton solutions; 11) non-holonomic problems; 12) boundary perturbations and genericity; 13) well posedness for evolutinary problems; 14) discontinuous vector fields; 15) automorphic dynamic; 16) oceanic dynamics and 17) computational homology applied to nonlinear dynamics. Plenary lectures were delivered by Jack Hale (Georgia Tech), Konstantin Mischaikow (Georgia Tech), George Sell (University of Minnesota), Waldyr Muniz Oliva (Universidade Técnica de Lisboa e Universidade de São Paulo), John Mallet-Paret (Brown University), Yingfei Yi (Georgia Tech), Carlos Rocha (Universidade Técnica de Lisboa), Shui-Nee Chow (Georgia Tech), Neus Consul (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya), José Arrieta (Universidade Complutense de Madrid), Pavel Sobolevskii (Universidade Federal do Ceará), Djairo Guedes de Figueiredo (Universidade Estadual de Campinas), Joan Sola-Morales (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya), Marco Antônio Teixeira (Universidade Estadual de Campinas) and Orlando Lopes (Universidade Estadual de Campinas).

   The last activity on the morning of Tuesday 21 was a special section in memory of Dan Henry. During this special section Jack Hale, Waldyr Oliva, Hildebrando Rodrigues as well as many other participants from the audience shared some special moments that they had spent with Dan. It was a very emotional time sprinkled with moments of humor from the many peculiar stories that people would tell about the very special character of Dan.


From left to right: Hildebrando M. Rodrigues Jack Hale
and Waldyr M. Oliva


Also during this section Sérgio Muniz Oliva announced a very nice work that he has been doing with Antônio Luiz Pereira and Luiz Augusto Fernandes de Oliveira (all from the Instituto de Matemática e Estatística of the Universidade de São Paulo where Dan worked for many years). They have managed to gather together many of Dan's unpublished works, most of them handwritten, and convert them to electronic files. Copies of the 04 CD's set were made available to the speakers and soon a web site with the same contents will be available to everyone (we still have a few copies to share).


In many events that we promoted we had the opportunity to have Dan among us. We were fortunate enough to have registered these moments. Some pictures of these events are included below with a short description of the meeting.



This picture was taken in Águas de Lindoia (São Paulo, Brazil) in 1996 during the II Americas Conference in Differential Equations and Nonlinear Analysis. At that time we were 06 former students of Jack Hale and Dan was among us. From left to right: José Arrieta, Sérgio Oliva, Orlando Lopes, Jack Hale, Arnaldo S. Nascimento, Dan Henry and Alexandre N. Carvalho
This picture was taken in the ICMC gardens during the ICMC Summer Meeting in Differential Equations 2000 Chapter. In the botton row you see, from left to right, G. Lozada-Cruz, L. Fichman, Dan Henry, Hildebrando M. Rodrigues, Alexandre N. Carvalho, Jack Hale, Jair S. Santos and Maria Aparecida Bená.


   The conference included a welcome reception on Monday at a Cachaçaria. This place is specialized in drinks made from cachaça (like "caipirinha''), typical Brazilian food and live local music. We had a great time there. After a few "caipirinhas" we even talked about Mathematics... We think ... On Tuesday the participants were taken to a special dinner with very flavorful Brazilian food and local drinks. As one can see from the serious faces on the pictures below, they were probably proving some very important theorems...


From the top clockwise: José Carlos Fernandes de Oliveira, Luiz Augsto Fernandes de Oliveira, German Jesus Lozada-Cruz, Sérgio Muniz Oliva Filho, Neus Consul, Konstantin Mischaikow, Shui-Nee Chow, George Sell, John Mallet-Parret, Yingfei Yi, Radoslaw Czaja, Antônio Luiz Pereira and Maria do Carmo Carbinato.




Sitting from left to right: Yingfei Yi, Radoslaw Czaja, Antônio Luiz Pereira, Maria do Carmo Carbinato, Luiz Augusto de Oliveira and José Carlos de Oliveira Sitting from left to right: Waldyr Oliva, Orlando Lopes, Carlos
Rocha, Jack Hale and Plácido Táboas



The conference was sponsored by:

Istituto de Ciências Matemáticas e de Computação,
Pro-Reitoria de Pós-Graduação da Universidade de São Paulo 
Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)
Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento à Pesquisa (CNPq)
Instituto do Milênio AGIMB.
CAPES