Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, GA will host q-series 2011: A Conference on q-series, Partitions, and Special Functions over a three day period from March 14-16, 2011. This conference will be the sixth in a series of international conferences on q-series and related topics held in the Southeastern United States. The previous five successful conferences were all held at the University of Florida in Gainesville (1999, 2003, 2004, 2008, 2009).
The conference immediately follows the AMS Southeast Sectional Meeting at Georgia Southern March 12-13, to make it convenient for interested parties to attend both events. There will be seven plenary speakers, who will give 50 minute talks; and about twenty-three 20-minute speakers. One of the main goals of the conference is bring together mathematicians from around the world who are interested and q-series and related topics to learn about each other's current research, and to facilitate collaborations among them. Talks will be presented by mathematicians from the level of graduate student through Professor Emeritus, and every level in between. The conference will also honor the lifetime achievements of two distinguished mathematicians, Mourad E. H. Ismail and Dennis W. Stanton.
The theory of partitions and q-series lies in the intersection of number theory, combinatorics, and classical analysis, and has applications in physics, computer science, and vertex operator algebra theory. Speakers will present talks which collectively will cover the breadth of this wide and deep subject area.
The National Science Foundation awarded a grant in the amount of $20,000 to help make possible q-Series 2011: an international conference on q-series, partitions, and special functions, held at Georgia Southern University, in Statesboro, Georgia, from March 14-16, 2011. The funding was used to supply partial travel support to conference speakers and to students and postdoctoral researchers (regardless of whether they were speakers). Many of the conference speakers who had access to alternate funding (such as through a research grant from the National Science Foundation or National Security Agency) generously declined an offer of travel support funding, in order to allow more support to be distributed to students and postdocs. The areas of q-series, partitions, and special functions are classical disciplines within pure mathematics which remain furtile ground for cutting edge research, nonetheless have known applications to the sciences, in particular statistical mechanics (a branch of physics) and symbol computation (an interdisciplinary branch of mathematics and computer science). We were pleased to have several speakers who had earned their doctorates in disciplines outside of mathematics (e.g. physics). In order for the sciences to make progress, it is important for meetings such as these to be held and to be supported by both federal and academic sources. Scientific progress requires sparks of intuiution which do not often occur in isolation. Beside the formal programs of lectures, where participants learn the latest on what their colleagues have been working on, the informal interactions between partcipants can, and often does, lead to new ideas and new results. Clearly, students and early career practitioners benefit greatly from the opportunity to listen to and interact with the distinguished senior members of the discipline. I would argue that the reverse is equally true. Conferences such as this one bring together interested parties from around the globe. While the majority of participating mathematicians are based in the USA, , people from a dozen countries traveled to Statesboro, Georgia to take part in this important conference. The Ramanujan Journal , a journal published by Springer, is publishing a fully refereed proceedings of this conference as its May-June 2013 issue. The principal investigator of the grant acted as a Guest Editor for this special issue of The Ramanujan Journal, and was delighted by the quantity and quality of contributions by conference participants.
