Conferences and Meetings: Southwest Center for Arithmetic Geometry

University Of Arizona, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

The Southwest Center for Arithmetic Geometry will continue its series of annual "Winter Schools" in 2013, 2014, 2015, with the 2013 Arizona Winter School taking place March 9-13, 2013 at the University of Arizona in Tucson, AZ. The Southwest Center for Arithmetic Geometry was founded in 1997. The NSF has provided the primary support for the center since its inception, with renewal of funding in 2002, 2006, 2009, and 2012. The primary activity of the Southwest Center is the Arizona Winter School (AWS), an annual meeting which has become a prominent national event and provides high-level training and research experience for graduate students in arithmetic geometry. The AWS is an intensive five-day meeting, organized around a different central topic each year, that features a set of courses by leading and emerging experts. The AWS is not a traditional conference: the speakers organize courses of four lectures, provide lecture notes in advance, and propose projects for graduate students to work on during the meeting. Nightly working sessions on these projects and on separate problem sets are run by the speakers and postdoctoral fellows. On the last day, students present their findings to the participants of the meeting. The result is a particularly intense and focused five days of mathematical activity for everyone involved. Recent Winter School topics have included Number Theory and Dynamics, Stark-Heegner Points, and Ramification and Geometry. The topics of upcoming Winter Schools will be guided by future mathematical developments. At the Winter School, connections among peers are formed, and mentoring relationships between students and senior researchers are developed. As has been the case at previous Winter Schools, subsequent collaborations between participants at all levels are the norm. Students make concrete strides toward becoming research mathematicians, post-doctoral assistants gain valuable mentoring experience in their academic careers, and faculty develop new interests and see new connections that lead to important published results. The Southwest Center website shares reusable content from the Winter Schools, including lecture notes, project descriptions, and audio and video of lectures. Through these thorough records, the dialogues begun at the AWS are extended to the greater mathematical community, and the efforts of the AWS participants are made freely and indefinitely available to all. More information about the upcoming and past Arizona Winter School programs can be found at the Southwest Center's website: http://swc.math.arizona.edu/