Numerical Analysis

David Persson presents Polar Express, a method for polar decomposition and the matrix sign function motivated by the Muon neural-network optimizer. It uses matrix multiplications suited to GPUs and adapts each polynomial update through a minimax problem to reduce worst-case error. The talk covers convergence, finite-precision implementation in bfloat16 and validation-loss improvements when training GPT-2 on FineWeb data. This is an in-person PACM IDeAS seminar at Princeton.

The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics convenes its triennial conference on applied and numerical linear algebra. The programme covers matrix computations, machine learning, quantum simulation, inverse problems, high-performance computing, dynamical systems, model reduction, optimal transport, network science, tensor methods and related applications. Proposal submissions are currently open, with minitutorial and minisymposium proposals due 26 October 2026 and contributed presentation abstracts due 23 November 2026.

Stockholm University's Department of Mathematics is recruiting a postdoctoral fellow to develop numerical time-stepping methods for glacial ice dynamics. The project connects computational mathematics, continuum modeling and climate-response questions through efficient and reliable simulation methods.

David Persson presents Polar Express, a method for polar decomposition and the matrix sign function motivated by the Muon neural-network optimizer. It uses matrix multiplications suited to GPUs and adapts each polynomial update through a minimax problem to reduce worst-case error. The talk covers convergence, finite-precision implementation in bfloat16 and validation-loss improvements when training GPT-2 on FineWeb data. This is an in-person PACM IDeAS seminar at Princeton.

The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics convenes its triennial conference on applied and numerical linear algebra. The programme covers matrix computations, machine learning, quantum simulation, inverse problems, high-performance computing, dynamical systems, model reduction, optimal transport, network science, tensor methods and related applications. Proposal submissions are currently open, with minitutorial and minisymposium proposals due 26 October 2026 and contributed presentation abstracts due 23 November 2026.