William Rowan Hamilton Geometry and Topology Workshop

Boston College, Chestnut Hill MA

Investigators

Abstract

The Seventh William Rowan Hamilton Geometry and Topology Workshop is a five-day, directed workshop on Geometry and Dynamics of Teichmüller Spaces, to be held at the Hamilton Mathematical Institute (HMI) in Dublin, Ireland, August 30-September 3, 2011. This years workshop will consist of a two-day mini-course for graduate students and junior researchers on Teichmüller theory, followed by a three day lecture series. Among the main topics of the workshop will be the recent work of Kahn and Markovic which combine methods from hyperbolic geometry with ergodic and mixing properties of geodesic flow to make a number of important breakthroughs including the proof of the surface subgroup conjecture for closed hyperbolic manifolds and a recently posted proof of the Ehrenpries conjecture. Another topic will be to generalize work on classical Teichmüller space to other moduli spaces such as the Hitchen component H_n(S) of surface representations into SL(n,R) and the Culler-Vogtmann Outer space X_n of a free group. The goal of the William Rowan Hamilton Geometry and Topology Workshop is to investigate common themes and techniques among significant areas of current research in geometry and topology and to support junior researchers interested in these areas. The workshop will bring together leading researchers in geometry and topology with graduates students and junior researchers who have a special interest in problems related to Geometry and Dynamics of Teichmüller Spaces and will investigate a number of important questions at the forefront of research in these areas. The confluence of expertise from different areas will result in new collaborative projects, and in broadening the research horizons of the participants. http://www.hamilton.tcd.ie/events/gt/gt2011.htm