This award is for partial support of the sixteenth West Coast Operator Algebra Seminar (WCOAS), to be held at University of Nevada, Reno on October 17-18 2009. This will provide full travel support for speakers, graduate students, and postdocs, and partial support for other participants. It is expected that approximately 60 participants, including some 25 graduate students and postdocs, to attend the weekend seminar, which will feature nine 50-minute talks on current topics.
The WCOAS is a tradition among the operator algebraists in the western United States. It provides an opportunity for researchers to disseminate their own results; furnishing an opportunity for researchers learn about recent research of others and to stay abreast of current work; fostering collaborative research by giving researchers the opportunity to meet and discuss their work with one another. It also offers encouragement and nurturing of graduate students and postdocs by giving them the opportunity to present their own work, learn about recent work, and meet established researchers in operator algebras; creation and maintenance of a cohesive regional community of operator algebraists; fostering connections between the faculty and students at research universities and those at primarily undergraduate institutions.