This award provides support for participants in the research training group in geometry and topology at the University of Chicago. The program will be led by six faculty members (Danny Calegari, Alex Eskin, Benson Farb, J. Peter May, Shmuel Weinberger, and Anne M. Wilkinson) who will work in collaboration with other members of the Department of Mathematics to build on the department's successes in the academic year Directed Reading Program and summer Research Experience for Undergraduates program by further enhancing the training of undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows. Graduate students and postdocs will be involved in topics courses taught by postdocs and in the support of research-oriented summer programs for undergraduates. Shorter, immersive summer workshops for graduate students and postdocs will build on the longstanding tradition of the Midwest Topology Seminar and related conferences that regularly bring together researchers throughout the Great Lakes states. Group activities for the academic year include a geometric literacy course that ranges widely in topics, and a topology proseminar.
This research training group aims to achieve a greater integration of fields that have grown apart over the decades and to expose participants to a broader range of potential applications than has been traditional. Research training will be anchored by research topics ranging broadly through dynamical systems and ergodic theory, a variety of topics in and around geometric group theory, the striking failure of rigidity in arithmetic lattices, homological stability phenomena, and various topics in algebraic topology, from equivariant stable homotopy theory through applied algebraic topology and data analysis.
