Dan Bienstock, Columbia University

Abstract

Infrastructure - such as roads, bridges, railways - is the backbone of a functional and healthy community. When parts of this infrastructure are threatened, it is critical for society to respond to that threat or risk loss of life and property. One of the most significant threats to our infrastructure in recent U.S. history has been as the result of hurricanes, most memorably Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans, and Hurricane Sandy, from which the infrastructure of New York City is still recovering from.  Likewise, the power grid failure in the U.S. Northeast and Canada in 2003, exhibited an underlying and poorly understood weakness in a vital system that we depend on daily.  In this talk we will discuss ongoing work, on several fronts, using mathematics and computing to model and plan for extreme events such as those described above.