Graduate Student Topology Conference

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

Abstract Award: DMS-0555730 Principal Investigator: Kent E. Orr The Graduate Student Topology Conference will provide graduate student training and create opportunities via student talks, via communication of recent advances, and by introducing students to others within their field. We accomplish this with the participation of established research leaders who will give plenary talks and interact with students, and through graduate student talks. Vaughan Jones from UC Berkeley and Dusa MacDuff from SUNY Stony Brook will give keynote presentations. A winner of the 1990 Fields Medal, Jones is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. After celebrated work in von Neumann algebras, Jones established a new paradigm for knot theoretic research with his breakthrough discovery of the Jones Polynomial. Dusa McDuff is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of London. She has numerous honors including the Satter Prize of the American Mathematical Society in 1991. Graduate students will present a range of topics from elementary introductions of fundamental topics to ongoing research. Topology is an abstracted form of geometry studying the aspects of geometric objects which are unchanged through continuous deformation. Of particular interest to geometric topology is the classification of manifolds, that is, spaces which near each point look Euclidean. One often solves a geometric topology problem by relating it to other algebraic problems that are more tractable. The algebraic tools so developed have substantial independent interest within algebraic topology. Topology is a central field of theoretical mathematics having broad applications to physics and other sciences. The conference takes place at the Bloomington, Indiana campus of Indiana University on April 1 - 2, 2006, and will encourage essential communication and collaboration among graduate students working in the area of topology, and pertaining to their research initiatives. The conference web page is http://www.indiana.edu/~gstc/.