Bindel co-organizes wonderful SIAM Mini-Symposium for Van Loan's retirement

David Bindel and Ilse Ipsen (NC State) jointly organized a two-part minisymposium in honor of Charlie Van Loan’s retirement on July 13 at the SIAM Annual Meeting in Boston.  The afternoon session was standing room only as colleagues came out to give their well-wishes and see some fascinating talks highlighting some of Van Loan's contributions.
 
Speakers described a wide variety of areas Van Loan touched over his career: Tammy Kolda and Orly Alter spoke about tensor factorizations for data compression and cancer diagnostic, Chris Bischof spoke about structured simulations of super carbon nanotubes, Bo Kågström spoke on work with Van Loan on fast linear algebra software, Nick Higham spoke on Van Loan’s the matrix exponential, Rob Schreiber spoke on a rotation-plus-rank-one decomposition from computational imaging, and Cleve Moler spoke on computing zeros of polynomials. Moler  gave his talk in an ancient shirt with “Ax = \lambda*x” written on it --- the very one that Charlie gave members of his thesis committee on graduating those many years ago.
 
Don Knuth, Gil Strang, and various other luminaries, as well as many former Cornell NA students and faculty, plus one future one (Anil Dmale) were in attendance.