Last week, the Ilya Zaliapin Memorial Conference was held May 12 and 13 at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. The conference brought together earthquake scientists, mathematicians and statisticians to share research problems and enhance collaborations.

Ilya Zaliapin was a beloved professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and passed away unexpectedly in 2023. His research focused on problems related to Horton’s Law, which describes hierarchical relationships often seen in natural phenomena like rivers, trees and earthquakes.

“Ilya was an exemplary member of the department and is greatly missed,” Department of Mathematics and Statistics Chair Tin Yau Tam said. “This conference is being organized to honor Ilya’s memory and to celebrate his significant contributions to the research community and his impact on colleagues, collaborators and students.”

The two-day conference opened with an introduction from Professor Yehuda Ben-Zion at the University of Southern California, Zaliapin’s collaborator and coauthor, and Elena Tchigriaeva, Zaliapin’s wife and an assistant dean in the College of Engineering. Over a dozen presentations on the statistics of seismology were attended by professors and students.

Attendees were housed in the dorms at Lake Tahoe, and speakers came from across the country and Canada to share their research findings bridging mathematics, statistics and seismology.

“Seismology has become a very data rich science, and seismologists need statisticians, like Ilya, to recognize structure in it all,” Corné Kreemer, a research professor in the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology and collaborator of Zaliapin’s, said. “The statisticians make sure the seismologists are asking the right questions and testing meaningful hypotheses, and they provide the tools for the seismologists to do so. Ilya would have loved the meeting and be honored so much of the discussion was rooted in his foundational work.”

The conference was sponsored by the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, led by Tam. Organizers included Tam, Kreemer, associate professor in the Nevada Seismological Laboratory Daniel Trugman, and Ben-Zion.

Zaliapin was a well-known statistician in the geophysical sciences and developed a new statistical method to identify earthquake clusters, among other contributions to geophysics. He was a strong collaborator and was dedicated to training the next generation of statisticians and scientists.