This award will support an NSF/CMBS regional conference to be held at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in the summer of 2012 on the topic of nuclear C*-algebras. The principal speaker will be Professor Wilhelm Winter from the University of Muenster. This award will support 24 participants at different stages of their careers.
The conference will focus on the recent advances made by Dr. Winter and his colleagues in nuclear C*-algebras and their connections with topological dynamical systems. Lectures will be designed to be accessible to graduate students and mathematicians with only basic knowledge of C*-algebras, and new open problems which present good research opportunities for graduate students will be discussed.
This conference concerned recent exciting breakthroughs in the classification of amenable C*-algebras and their connections to topological dynamics. This is an important and fundamental area of research. The principal lecturer was Professor Wilhelm Winter who is a major contributor in recent developments. In addition to Professor Winter's lectures, there were three plenary speakers who themselves were leading contributors in their fields, and their lectures helped to expose the audience to the connections between C*-algebras and dynamics (as well as other subjects). There were also seven junior speakers (i.e., students and young people at the beginning of their careers). The conference was a great success and we had uniformly good reactions throughout the conference and afterwards. Among other things, during the conference, there were a lot of back and forth between the speakers and the audience, as well as much interaction during the coffee breaks. The audience consisted of a good mixture. Half of the audience consisted of younger people (students or young persons within three years of PhD completion). There were also older people with established international research reputations. There were also a significant number of women and participants from underrepresented groups. This conference also provides a basis for a research monograph by the principal speaker (which he will submit to the CBMS one year after the conference). Finally, the conference webpage (which contains lecture notes etc.) is www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~pwn1677/cbms2012.html. In short, this was a productive and enjoyable conference, and we thank the CBMS and NSF for giving us this opportunity.
