Principal Investigator: Shrawan Kumar, David A. Vogan, Nolan R. Wallach
This award provides partial support for US-based students and junior researchers attending a conference in May 2008 at the Pacific Institute of Mathematics (PIMS) in Vancouver, B.C. The meeting is devoted to Lie theory and related subjects, including invariant theory, representation theory in several aspects, symplectic geometry, Kac-Moody Lie algebras and structures associated to them such as groups and flag varieties, quantum cohomology of homogeneous spaces, and Dirac cohomology.
This international conference is devoted to topics of current interest that owe much to the work of Bertram Kostant, who is to be honored at the meeting. Many of the conference presentations and much of Kostant's long research career have been devoted to exploring and exploiting symmetries of geometric objects. The Lie groups cited above, named for 19th-century mathematician Sophus Lie, are continuous collections of symmetries, exemplified by the full group of rigid motions of the Euclidean plane, or by the group of all rotations of a three-dimensional sphere. The web site of the conference host, the Pacific Institute of Mathematics, is http://pims.math.ca/, and the web site for this conference is http://pims.math.ca/science/2008/08kostant/.