The Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Berry College (Mount Berry, Georgia) will host the Spring Topology and Dynamical Systems Conference, March 17-19, 2005. The Spring Topology and Dynamical Systems Conference (STDC) is one of the longest standing conferences in general topology, having started in 1967 and continuing as an annual conference. Over the years, the STDC has become broader, encompassing most of the areas of topology and of topological approaches to dynamical systems. STDC 2005 will have four special sessions running in parallel: Continuum Theory, Dynamical Systems, General and Set-Theoretic Topology, and Geometric Topology and Geometric Group Theory. To promote unity and interaction, there will be 12 invited talks of 25-minutes in two parallel sessions, and 6 plenary talks of 50 minutes. It is our intention that many of these semi-plenary and plenary talks emphasize interaction of the research agendas of two or more conference areas.
Topology is the branch of mathematics concerned with those properties of objects that are unaffected by stretching, twisting and bending. For example, if a point within some object is approximated by a sequence of points converging to it, then twisting and bending the object does not affect the approximation. Because this notion of approximation lies at the heart of so many areas of mathematics, topology plays an important role across the discipline. In particular, the area of Dynamical Systems relies heavily on topological ideas. This branch of mathematics studies the effects of iteratively applying a rule (or rules) to the elements of some set. For example, rules which model weather conditions and population growth over time have become paradigms in this field. The most surprising fact regarding systems such as these is that even very simple rules applied to nearly identical elements can produce wildly different and unpredictable outcomes. Thus, chaos theory falls within the realm of dynamical systems.
