Conference: Geometric methods in group theory

Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN

Investigators

Abstract

The conference on "Geometric Methods in Group Theory" will take place at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, over the weekend of April 22-24, 2016. The conference is one of the Shanks Workshops that are held at Vanderbilt Univeristy, with several taking place each year on a wide array of subjects spanning all areas of mathematics. The talks at this workshop will focus on recent advances in the area of geometric group theory, with speakers including Mladen Bestvina (University of Utah), Kate Juschenko (Northwestern), Ilya Kapovich (UIUC), Olga Kharlampovich (CUNY) and Piotr Przytycki (McGill). Geometric group theory is a rapidly progressing area of research, providing a modern approach to group theory as well as the many associated topics. The geometric and topological properties of spaces on which groups act have led to many new and powerful results, such as Gromov's theorem that polynomial growth of balls in a finitely generated group is equivalent to the group containing a finite index nilpotent subgroup, or Yu's result that the existence of a uniform embedding of a group into a Hilbert space implies the group satisfies the Novikov and coarse Baum-Connes conjectures. The conference will have talks about recent advances in the area. Conference website: https://my.vanderbilt.edu/shanksgroups16/