The 3rd NCTS-iTHEMS Joint Workshop on Theoretical, Mathematical, and Computational Sciences on August 18, 2026
The 3rd NCTS-iTHEMS Joint Workshop on Theoretical, Mathematical, and Computational Sciences was held from August 18 to 21, 2026, at the NCTS Physics Lecture Hall in the Cosmology Hall of National Taiwan University (NTU), Taipei. This was the third workshop in the series jointly organized by Taiwan's National Center for Theoretical Sciences (NCTS) and RIKEN iTHEMS, following the first workshop hosted by NCTS in 2024 and the second hosted by RIKEN in 2025.
This year's workshop carried special significance as the first major joint activity after the signing ceremony held at NTU on April 23, 2026, where iTHEMS and NCTS launched the joint research initiative "Mathematical Frontiers for Matter, Life, and the Universe." The initiative, signed by iTHEMS Director Satoshi Iso and NCTS Directors Pei-Ming Ho and Ming-Lun Hsieh, aims to foster outstanding early-career researchers and to promote researcher exchanges, international symposia, and collaborative research between the two institutions. Reflecting this spirit, the scope of the workshop expanded beyond previous editions to encompass theoretical physics, mathematics, and computational sciences.
The four-day program featured 28 talks and 10 posters. Three plenary lectures were delivered by Tzu-Chieh Wei (Stony Brook University) on the stability of quantum many-body phases against time-dependent perturbations, Etera Livine (ENS Lyon) on spinfoam approaches to quantum gravity, and Tan Bui-Thanh (UT Austin) on model-constrained scientific machine learning for digital twins. Thirteen invited speakers from RIKEN iTHEMS and twelve from Taiwanese universities and Academia Sinica presented research spanning high-energy physics, gravity, condensed matter physics, quantum information and computing, geometry and topology, applied mathematics, machine learning, and scientific AI. In the poster session, ten presenters, mostly students and early-career researchers, introduced their work in three-minute flash talks followed by lively discussions over coffee.
The directors of both institutions delivered the opening and closing remarks, and the iTHEMS and NCTS organizers held internal discussions on future joint activities during the workshop. The interdisciplinary atmosphere led to many cross-field conversations during the coffee breaks, the poster session, and the banquet, and several new contacts between researchers of the two institutions were established.
We thank the NCTS staff for their excellent local organization and all speakers and participants for making the workshop a success. We look forward to continuing the series and to deepening the collaboration between NCTS and iTHEMS under the new initiative.
Reported by Ching-Kai Chiu