Cascade Topology Seminar

Portland State University, Portland OR

Investigators

Abstract

Abstract Award: DMS-0090101 Principal Investigator: Steven A. Bleiler This award will provide partial support for speakers and others at semiannual conferences in the series known as the ``Cascade Topology Seminar,'' over a three-year period beginning in 2001. These conferences will be held at various universities in the northwestern United States and southwestern Canada, including the Universities of Oregon, Washington, and Puget Sound, and Boise, Portland, and Oregon State Universities. Typically there will be half a dozen principal speakers on topics ranging widely over geometry and topology, the majority from outside the home institutions of the Seminar, and more than fifty participants altogether, roughly half of them faculty and half of them graduate students, as well as an occasional undergraduate student. Participation by younger mathematicians, by women, and by underrepresented minorities is encouraged. The mathematics presented in meetings of the Cascade Topology Seminar ranges widely over topology and geometry. Topological issues include algebraic and geometric methods for describing and characterizing spatial problems such as the challenge of recognizing whether two knotted curves in three-space are essentially identical. Geometric topics addressed in the Seminar include differential geometry, which emphasizes measures of the curvature of spaces and the consequences of curvature for analytic problems, as well as algebraic geometry, which has its roots in the study of families of solutions to polynomial equations. Abstract Award: DMS-0090101 Principal Investigator: Steven A. Bleiler This award will provide partial support for speakers and others at semiannual conferences in the series known as the ``Cascade Topology Seminar,'' over a three-year period beginning in 2001. These conferences will be held at various universities in the northwestern United States and southwestern Canada, including the Universities of Oregon, Washington, and Puget Sound, and Boise, Portland, and Oregon State Universities. Typically there will be half a dozen principal speakers on topics ranging widely over geometry and topology, the majority from outside the home institutions of the Seminar, and more than fifty participants altogether, roughly half of them faculty and half of them graduate students, as well as an occasional undergraduate student. Participation by younger mathematicians, by women, and by underrepresented minorities is encouraged. The mathematics presented in meetings of the Cascade Topology Seminar ranges widely over topology and geometry. Topological issues include algebraic and geometric methods for describing and characterizing spatial problems such as the challenge of recognizing whether two knotted curves in three-space are essentially identical. Geometric topics addressed in the Seminar include differential geometry, which emphasizes measures of the curvature of spaces and the consequences of curvature for analytic problems, as well as algebraic geometry, which has its roots in the study of families of solutions to polynomial equations.