This project funds travel awards to support six U.S. based researchers to participate in the Special Session on Algebra and Model Theory at the First International Meeting of the American Mathematical Society and the Sociedad de Matematica de Chile in Pucon, Chile, December 15-18, 2010. Preference will be given to participants who are Ph.D. students or are researchers who earned their Ph.D.'s within the last 8-10 years and have limited or no other means of travel support. It is hoped that the Special Session and a possible satellite meeting will provide for extensive interaction between U.S. and South American logicians beyond already well-established research contacts and display the vitality of logic in South America to the broader South American mathematical community.
The Association for Symbolic Logic, which will administer the project, is the leading international professional society for logicians, whose membership includes researchers in computer science, cognitive science, linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy. It organizes and sponsors a number of important meetings throughout the world. Increasing the visibility and presence of logic outside North America and Europe, particularly in Latin America and Asia, is one of the Association's highest long-term priorities. The Association, through its activities and publications, also actively seeks to embrace new and emerging fields in which logic has come to play an important role, including computer science, linguistics, and cognitive science. Further information on the Association may be found on its web site: www.aslonline.org.
This award to the Association for Symbolic Logic partially supported six travel grants to US national and US-based researchers to participate in the Special Session on Algebra and Model Theory at the First International Meeting of the American Mathematical Society and the Sociedad de Matematica de Chile in Pucón, Chile, December 15-18, 2010, and the two-day Satellite Meeting on ``Algebra and Model Theory'' held in Pucón on December 13-14. The Special Session and Satellite Meeting were organized by: Alf Onshuus, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia; Thomas Scanlon, University of California, Berkeley, USA; Charles Steinhorn, Vassar College, USA; and Xavier Vidaux, Universidad de Concepcion, Chile. The selection of travel grant recipients was made by the Organizing Committee, with preference given to participants who earned their Ph.D.'s within the last 8-10 years and have limited or no other means of travel support. The Association for Symbolic Logic, the administrative organization for this project, is the leading professional society for logicians in the world. Charles Steinhorn, in his capacity as the Secretary-Treasurer of the Association for Symbolic Logic, was responsible for administering the travel grant program that was supported by the award. The two main meetings of the Association are the ASL North American Annual Meeting and the ASL European Summer Meeting (also known as the Logic Colloquium). The Association also meets annually at the Joint Mathematics Meetings, where it typically co-sponsors one or more events with the American Mathematical Society and/or the Mathematical Association of America, and on a rotating basis with one of the three divisions of the American Philosophical Association. The ASL also sponsors meetings throughout the world in which logic and its applications are central. The ASL-sponsored meetings during the period of this award were: Sino-European Winter School in Logic, Language and Computation (SELLC-2010) (China); Sixth Computability, Complexity and Randomness (CCR 2011) and Eighth International Conference on Computability and Complexity in Analysis (CCA 2011) (co-located meetings in South Africa); Young Set Theorists Workshop (Germany); Eighteenth Workshop on Logic, Language, Information and Computation (WoLLIC'2011) (USA); XVI EBL-Brazilian Logic Meeting/ Encontro Brasileiro de Lógica (Brazil); Third International Congress on Tools for Teaching Logic (TICTTL) (Spain); Recent Developments in Model Theory (France); Twenty-sixth Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS 2011) (Canada); Computability in Europe 2011 (CiE 2011): Models of Computation in Context (Bulgaria); Eighth Panhellenic Logic Symposium (PLS 8) (Greece); Infinity Conference (Spain); Twenty-third European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI) (Slovenia); and, Algebra, Combinatorics and Model Theory (Turkey). Increasing the visibility and presence of logic outside North America and Europe is one of the ASL's highest long-term priorities. There already is substantial activity in Australia, Asia, and Latin America on which the ASL intends to build. In 2007, ongoing funding was authorized by the ASL Council for two highly successful meetings that the ASL has regularly sponsored: the biannual Asian Logic Conference (ALC) and the biannual Simposio Latinamericano de Logica Matematica (SLALM). It is hoped that these meetings may someday move from ASL-sponsored status to become official ASL regional meetings. Recently, the ASL was awarded an NSF grant to support participation in the 2011 Asian Logic Conference by U.S.-based researchers, with preference given to young scholars, and a similar grant proposal to NSF is anticipated for the 2012 SLALM. The 2011 Asian Logic Conference, which took place this December in Wellington, New Zealand, was a superb international meeting; further information may be found at http://msor.victoria.ac.nz/Events/ALC2011/WebHome. Planning for the 2012 SLALM, which will take place in Bogota, Colombia in June/July 2012 currently is underway for what promises to be a vibrant international conference as well. The website for this event is http://matematicas.uniandes.edu.co/eventos/SLALM2012/. Six individual travel grants were made to US national or US-based researchers under this award. Twelve individuals spoke in the Special Session, including three of those awarded travel grants. Twenty-nine researchers participated in the Satellite Meeting, including sixteen from South America, nine from North America, and four from Europe. Two of the travel award recipients delivered forty-minute lectures and and a third gave a fifty-minute talk. Complete information about the Satellite Meeting, including abstracts of talks, can be found at http://dmat.cfm.cl/Congreso/Pucon/SatellitePucon.html. It also should be noted that ASL presidential discretionary funds supported the costs for room and A/V rental.
