This award provides support for two weekend conferences, one at the University of North Texas in Fall 2011 and the other at Oklahoma State University in Spring 2012. Each conference will feature two or three prominent guest speakers from outside the Texas-Oklahoma region, in addition to other participants including students, post-doctoral researchers, and junior faculty. Regional graduate students and researchers will also give talks describing their work. It is expected that the conferences will facilitate collaborations and interactions among the students and researchers in the region who work in the areas of Automorphic Forms, Representation Theory, and Number Theory. These conferences are planned as the first two of the Texas-Oklahoma Representations and Automorphic (TORA) conference series, pending continued funding. The TORA conference series is planned to consists of semi-annual meetings, hosted by University of North Texas, Oklahoma State University, and University of Oklahoma, on a rotating basis.
Over the last century, the theories of automorphic forms and representations have grown enormously. Important applications impact various fields of research, ranging from coding theory, algebraic geometry, and topology to Kac-Moody algebras and quantum field theory. The interplay of automorphic forms and representation theory has been especially fruitful, and many surprising and deep results have emerged. The TORA series will emphasize the interplay between automorphic forms and representations, both in the classical and adelic languages, and other related topics.
series is a new conference program designed to launch collaborations in automorphic forms and representation theory in the Texas-Oklahoma region. Over the past decade, several universities in North Texas and Oklahoma have grown research programs in automorphic forms, representation theory, and their interactions and applications. A unique opportunity arose to forge a focused community of support, exchange, and mentoring for students and faculty at all career levels - a community proting multiple universities simultaneously. A series of meetings is now held twice a year in rotation by the Oklahoma State University, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of North Texas. Each TORA meeting features two prominent guest speakers from outside the Texas-Oklahoma region to present cutting-edge results. Regional researchers and graduate students also give talks describing their work. Collaboration is expected to nourish not only between institutions, but also among mathematical specialties. Number theorists and algebraists from diverse perspectives will glean new techniques and ideas during the talks and the informal interactions surrounding each meeting. TORA III was held at the University of Oklahoma September 28-30, 2012. The 47 participants of the conference included 22 tenure/tenure-track faculty (3 female), 9 post-doctoral faculty (2 female), and 16 graduate students (8 female). There were 14 talks on various aspects of automorphic forms and representation theory. The plenary talks were given by Paul Garrett (University of Minnesota) and Wen-Ching Winnie Li (Penn State University and National Center for Theoretical Sciences, Taiwan), and the invited graduate student talk was given by Alia Hamieh (University of British Columbia). In addition to the above talks, we had one special session Speed TORA", where 13 people gave 5 minute talks giving the audience a glimpse of their current research. Several graduate students presented their thesis topic in Speed TORA. The organizers received extremely positive feedback about TORA III: several graduate students expressed their appreciation for the opportunity to speak on their thesis results, and they commented on benetting from discussions with peers and faculty from nearby institutions. Speed TORA was a tremendous success and is now going to be a recurring event in future TORA meetings. Many participants also indicated their desire to attend future TORA meetings.
