Principal Investigator: Edward C. Turner
This award provides partial support for the featured speakers and for some graduate students to attend the 2003 and 2004 Albany Group Theory Conferences. The conferences will be the thirteenth and fourteenth in a series of conferences dedicated to the interplay between group theory and topology. There will be seven main speakers, each of whom will give a one hour talk. In addition, there will be 20 - 25 short talks by participants. The conference will be held at the Rensselaerville Conference Center in October of 2003 and 2004. Further information is available at http://nyjm.albany.edu/~ted/03conf.html.
Groups are mathematical objects that abstract the essential properties from the collection of all symmetries of a geometric object (for example, think of all eight symmetries of a square, which can be composed of rotations about the center and of reflections about a diagonal). We can often turn this process of abstraction around and treat groups as geometric objects in their own right, with consequences for problems that originate in algebra, topology, combinatorics, and computability.
