Principal Investigator: Lizhen Ji
This award provides partial support for six days of meetings in Cambridge, Massachusetts during late summer 2008 on geometric analysis and related fields. The conference aims to develop a comprehensive overview of the present status and future directions of geometric analysis and its connections to many areas including algebraic geometry, analysis, topology, mathematical physics, and string theory.
The occasion for this large conference on geometric analysis and related geometric subjects is the sixtieth birthday of Shing-Tung Yau, one of the leaders in the area. Geometric analysis is a marriage of geometric problems and ideas, which often concern properties of geometric spaces on large scales, with analytic techniques that begin with small-scale features of geometry and sometimes allow us to extrapolate those to large-scale statements. Two of the great successes of geometric analysis are the Calabi Conjecture, settled by Yau in the 1970s and later found to be a key to the development of string theory, and the Poincare Conjecture, a celebrated problem that was open for more than one hundred years before its resolution just a few years ago by G. Perelman, who brought to maturity a program launched in the 1980s by R. Hamilton. Many of the results and techniques developed over the last thirty years in geometric analysis and differential geometry were essential to the proof of the Poincare Conjecture, and the ideas contributed to the problem by Perelman have set off worldwide activity on new questions in geometric analysis. For more information see the conference web site, http://pamq.henu.edu.cn/add/Yau/index.html.
