Shenzhen University School of Mathematical Sciences  

Liyuan Scholars Colloquium No. 132  

Lecture Title: Modelling rare events in complex systems

Speaker: Ren Weiqing (Professor, National University of Singapore)

Date & Time: 10:00–11:00 AM, May 23, 2025

Venue: Classroom 1, Huixing Building, Yuehai Campus, Shenzhen University

Abstract: Many problems in applied sciences can be abstractly formulated as systems navigating over complex energy landscapes. Well-known examples include conformational changes of bio-molecules, chemical reactions, nucleation events during phase transitions, and extreme events in some cases that lead to material or system failure, etc. These events happen infrequently relative to the relaxation timescale of the system, but when they do happen, they usually happen rather quickly and have important consequences. In this talk, I will discuss numerical methods for the study of such rare events, including the string method and the recently developed machine learning techniques.

Biography: Ren Weiqing is a professor at the National University of Singapore and a Senior Scientist at the Institute of High Performance Computing, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore. He received his Ph.D. from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, in 2002, followed by postdoctoral research at the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University. From 2005 to 2011, he served as an Assistant Professor at the Courant Institute. Professor Ren’s research focuses on scientific computing, with key contributions to the theory and computational methods for rare events, multiscale algorithm analysis, and slip contact line problems in fluid dynamics. He is the recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2007) and the Feng Kang Prize for Scientific Computing (2015).

All faculty and students are welcome to attend!

School of Mathematical Sciences  

May 21, 2025