Automorphic Forms Workshop

Oregon State University, Corvallis OR

Investigators

Abstract

The annual Workshop on Automorphic Forms and Related Topics has built a reputation as an internationally recognized and respected conference that is attended by leading experts in this broad area of mathematics. Traditionally, this workshop serves a healthy balance of students, junior faculty, and senior faculty from many types of academic institutions in geographically diverse areas and encourages them to deliver research presentations. This workshop strengthens the automorphic forms research community by providing mentoring and professional development for junior researchers in this active field. Automorphic forms is a central subject in contemporary number theory with deep connections to many areas across mathematics and the mathematical sciences including representation theory, combinatorics, and mathematical physics. In 2011, the theme of the Automorphic Forms Workshop is the theory of harmonic weak Maass forms. As an example of the subject's importance, in the last works of Ramanujan, in particular his last letter to Hardy and his lost notebook, the subject of mock theta functions was introduced. For many decades, mathematicians were unable to understand mock theta functions as part of a larger context. However in recent work of Zwegers, mock theta functions are identified as occurring as the holomorphic parts of harmonic weak Maass forms, thus generating a fresh torrent of research in Maass forms, mock modular forms, and automorphic forms in general.