On August 9th through 13th, Chapman University hosted the annual International Workshop on Operator Theory and its Applications Conference to bring together mathematicians and engineers who work in functional analysis and its application to related areas. This international conference brought over 200 attendees from all over the world, with guests participating on campus and remotely.

iwota attendees

President Daniele C. Struppa opened the conference with welcoming remarks, and also was a plenary speaker of the conference. His talk was “An Overview of the Mathematics of Superoscillations.” Other Chapman faculty that presented were Yakir Aharonov, Ph.D., and Ahmed Sebbar, Ph.D.

daniele struppa

 

 

Alpay - IWOTA

Schmid student Natanael Alpay ’22 also presented at the conference. Alpay began his time at Chapman in Spring 2018 and will graduate with degrees in mathematics, physics, computer science and French in Spring 2022. He initially started with a mathematics degree since his father, Schmid professor Dr. Daniel Alpay, shares his love for the field. He added on physics and computer science degrees after he took a few classes and found the subjects interested him as well. He pursued a fourth major in French as he already is fluent and decided he wanted to hone and improve his skills.

Alpay’s talk, titled “Generalized Fock Space and Fractional Derivative,” presented recent mathematical research in spaces of functions relevant in quantum mechanics and signal processing. His work is in collaboration with Paula Cerejeiras and Uwe Kahler from the University of Aveiro. This type of research is very theoretical and motivated by applications, says Alpay, also stating this is his favorite type of mathematics.

Though Alpay has presented at research conferences previously, this was his largest presentation yet. “Like every important event, it was very exciting and stressful, but it helped to have a close friend and the [Schmid] faculty among the audience,” says Alpay.

A special thank you to the local organizing committee, Daniel Alpay, Polona Durcik,
Ahmed Sebbar, Mihaela Vajiac and Cai Waegell.

You can learn more about the conference and view the program at chapman.edu/iwota2021.