This award is for partial support of conference with aims to foster interaction between those who use homogeneous spaces for different purposes. The primarily focuse is on the interaction between those who work on representation theory and those who work in geometric analysis and related fields. Recent progress toward a proof of Thurston's geometrization conjecture and the Poincare conjecture highlights the importance of homogeneous spaces to study three-dimensional manifolds and the Ricci flow. The Ricci flow approach has the potential also to help understand renormalization of nonlinear sigma models in physics as well as to smooth spatially inhomogeneous universes to more idealized Friedmann-Robertson-Walker homogeneous solutions to Einstein's equations in general relativity.
