This is a proposal to provide travel funding for the conference ``Geometry, Topology, and their Interactions'' to be held in Morelia, Mexico during January 8-13, 2007. The focus of this conference is the classification of manifolds, including both topological and geometric aspects. The central rigidity conjecture is the Farrell-Jones Conjecture, which generalizes both the Novikov and Borel rigidity conjectures. The conference will bring together researchers who use geometric methods to study topological problems with researchers who use topological methods to study geometric problems. Examples of the former are high-dimensional topologists and examples of the latter are geometric group theorists. While the conference will have speakers in a wide variety of fields, two fields of research will be particularly strongly represented: (1) surgery theory, L- and K-theory, and high dimensional topology, and (2) geometric group theory.
Recent years have seen an increasing exchange of methods and techniques between topology, algebra and geometry. Furthermore, recent trends in research suggest that methods arising from geometric group theory will be key to the resolution of (special cases of) various classical problems in high dimensional topology. One of the key purposes of this conference is to bring together these two communities of mathematicians, in the hope of fostering new collaborations and further interactions.
