Geometry, Rigidity, and Group Actions

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Abstract Award: DMS-0734851 Principal Investigator: Benson Farb The conference ""Geometry, Rigidity, and Group Actions"" will bring together researchers in a cluster of fields related to actions of lattices in semisimple Lie groups. The subject's roots concern linear representations of lattices, but developments in the past two decades have established strong connections with a variety of other topics, including ergodic theory, dynamics of group actions on compact manifolds, differential geometry, spaces of non-positive curvature, geometric group theory, symplectic geometry, algebraic groups, unitary representation theory, operator algebras, and group cohomology. Our lectures will include contributions from all of these areas. We are holding the conference on the occasion of Robert J. Zimmer's 60th birthday, in recognition of his work's dramatic impact on the growth of this area. The speaker list of this conference cuts across a variety of closely related areas of mathematics, and will present participants with the opportunity to learn about recent developments, important open questions, and the wide variety of successful techniques that are being applied. New developments are emerging rapidly and involve ideas from disparate areas of mathematics, so conferences of this type are necessary to keep established researchers up to date, and are even more valuable for young researchers who are entering this fast-paced, interdisciplinary research area. A Sunday-afternoon workshop will provide younger scholars with an opportunity to present their work and discuss it with other conference participants. Additional information is available from the conference web site at http://www.math.uchicago.edu/zimmer60/