Pacific Northwest Geometry Seminar

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

Abstract Award: DMS-0072397 Principal Investigator: John M. Lee The Pacific Northwest Geometry Seminar for 2000 to 2003 provides opportunities for communication between researchers and dissemination of results and problems in areas such as differential geometry, algebraic geometry, mathematical physics, topology, partial differential equations, complex analysis, and geometric representation theory. Universities based in the northwestern United States and British Columbia sponsor these biannual conferences, and local participants are augmented by speakers from outside the region. Modern geometry involves techniques and ideas drawn from all of mathematics and much of physics. Notions distinctive to the field include curvature, which deduces from measurements of length and angle the extent to which a geometric space differs from the simplest, flattest models; symplectic structures, which are the geometric underpinnings for the Hamiltonian formulation of mechanics, and our understanding of their geometry has been opened up dramatically by ideas borrowed from physics and complex analysis; and symmetry, since spaces with large groups of symmetries often give our best access to algebraic aspects of those symmetry groups, and since geometry and analysis at the space level can yield linear representations of a group or explain properties of these representations.