Principal Investigator: Jerry E. Vaughan, Alexander Chigogidze
The Spring Topology and Dynamical Systems Conferences (STDC) have been among the most successful and longest running annual topology conferences in the nation, attracting an international audience. The conference for 2006 will be the fortieth annual meeting of STDC. The conference brings together mathematicians and graduate students working in the two core areas, and covers most areas of topology and of topological approaches to dynamical systems. The conference fosters extensive interactions among adjacent research areas and their applications. This contributes greatly to the advancement of knowledge through communication of recent results to a broad audience. Further impact comes from publication of refereed papers from among those presented. The conference emphasizes participation by graduate students, young researchers, women and under represented minority groups. We expect the conference to attract about 200 participants. The conference activities feature hour plenary talks and half-hour talks in two parallel sessions given by leading experts, and four special sessions of contributed talks. The special sessions are entitled: Continuum Theory, Dynamical Systems, General and Set-Theoretic Topology, and Geometric Topology and Geometric Group Theory. It is our intention that many of these plenary and semi-plenary talks emphasize interaction of the research agendas of two or more conference areas.
Topology is a diverse area of mathematics that grew out of classical geometry and analysis. Its language and ideas pervade much of modern mathematics. Topics in topology range from the classification of surfaces in space to limits of sequences and approximation of various mathematical objects. A dynamical system is a physical setting together with rules for how the setting changes or evolves over the course of time (for example, population growth and fractals). The area of Dynamical Systems studies ways to predict the long-term behavior of such systems. The language and ideas of topology, which are heavily used in the area of Dynamical Systems, are often used in many areas of science such as physics, chemistry, and computer science. Recently, topological ideas are finding application in areas such as biology, psychology, sociology, medicine, and robotics. The meeting of the fortieth annual STDC helps insure the continued progress, growth and leadership of United States researchers in topology and topological methods in Dynamical Systems.
