The New York Group Theory Seminar is the oldest, continuously running research seminar in the New York City area - some 48 years. It was started around 1955 by Wilhelm Magnus and currently is held, for the most part, on Friday afternoons, at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York under the direction of Gilbert Baumslag and Sean Cleary, of the City College of New York. The emphasis of the seminar is on Combinatorial, Geometric and Computational Group Theory. Many of the talks touch also on three-dimensional topology, homological algebra and theoretical computer science. There are usually 10 seminars each semester. A sprinkling of these seminars are expository and are sometimes combined with one-day or two-day long workshops or conferences.
Groups are mathematical structures, which capture, in mathematical form, the nature of symmetry. It turns out, for this very reason, that they play an important role in crystallography, in particle physics, in geometry and in the study of the three-dimensional world that we live in. They are an important tool in many diverse mathematical disciplines as well as in theoretical computer science. Recently they have been used in cryptography, a field of enormous economic and strategic importance.
