2017 Redbud Geometry/Topology Conference

University Of Arkansas, Fayetteville AR

Investigators

Abstract

This NSF award will provide partial support for speakers and participants of two meetings in the Redbud Geometry/Topology Conference series. The first meeting will take place at the University of Arkansas, in Fayetteville, Arkansas on April 27-29, 2017. The fall meeting will be held at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma in fall of 2017. A key objective of the Redbud Conference series is to increase interaction and collaboration between geometers and topologists in the EPSCoR states of Arkansas and Oklahoma. These meetings continue the series of Redbud Conferences held twice per year beginning in Fall 2011 on a rotating basis at the University of Arkansas, Oklahoma State University, and the University of Oklahoma. The mathematical focus of the spring meeting in 2017 is geometric group theory and low dimensional topology. The opening day of the spring meeting is a graduate student workshop featuring three talks of an expository nature delivered by speakers from the conference. This gives graduate students from the Arkansas-Oklahoma region the opportunity to interact with the larger mathematical community. The fall meeting is intended to showcase the work of graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and junior faculty from the region. The specific focus of each meetings is as follows. The spring meeting will feature ten talks on geometric group theory and low dimensional topology. These are areas of intense research that utilize the interaction between the dynamics of group actions and the geometry of the spaces they act on to understand algebraic structure. Specific topics to be included are the outer automorphism group of a free group or a right-angled Artin group, the mapping class group of a surface and hyperbolic geometry. The fall meeting will feature five talks primarily by early-career mathematicians on a range of topics in topology and geometric group theory, based around the research interests of faculty at the three schools. The organizers will post notes and/or slides from the talks on the conference website. The conference website is comp.uark.edu/~mattclay/Redbud/