Dr. Sivaguru S. Sritharan, AFIT's Provost and Vice Chancellor, served as a Plenary Speaker at the International Industrial Mathematics Conference-I (I2MC-I) organized by the Department of Mathematics, University of Sri Jayewardenepura in Sri Lanka on 3-5 June 2016.  The tile of his talk was " The Clay Institute's Millennium Prize Problem in Mathematical Fluid Dynamics."

Modern mathematical fluid mechanics has been developing well over three centuries with profound applications in many branches of engineering sciences. At the turn of this millennium the Clay Institute identified seven outstanding problems in mathematics (with $1M award for resolution of each of the problems), one of which was a problem in the solvability of three dimensional fluid dynamics. In this talk, Dr. Sritharan gave an exposition of the mathematical problem and its probabilistic/stochastic counterpart. He also discussed some of the other famous mathematical problems currently being researched in modern nonlinear partial differential equations literature.

Dr. Sritharan received his BSc in Mechanical Engineering from University of Sri Lanka, Peradeniya Campus in 1977 with first class honors. He went to the U.S. for postgraduate studies in 1978 and received a MS in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the University of Washington, Seattle in 1979 and then a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of Arizona in 1982. In the past he has been a faculty member in University of Sri Lanka (Peradeniya), University of Southern California and University of Wyoming. He has also served as the Head of the Mathematics Department at University of Wyoming and the Dean of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey, California.  He has widely published in mathematical fluid dynamics, magneto-hydrodynamics, control theory and stochastic analysis and has given over three hundred lectures and invited colloquia in academic and research institutions world-wide.

Dr. Sivaguru S. Sritharan, AFIT's Provost and Vice Chancellor (far right) at the International Industrial Mathematics Conference-I in Sri Lanka with the Prime Minister of  Sri Lanka, Hon. Ranil Wickremesinghe (fourth from the left)