This proposal supports U.S.-based participants attending the "Young Geometric Group Theory" meeting to be held at the Banach Center in Bedlewo, Poland from January 9-13, 2012. There will be four senior speakers giving mini-courses on fundamental topics, as well as seven outstanding postdocs giving short talks on their work. The planned talks cover basic examples in geometric group theory such as Artin groups, CAT(0) groups, limit groups, and lattices in Lie groups; the mini-courses make connections with other fields of mathematics including representation theory, projective geometry, geometric measure theory, and logic.
Geometric group theory is a fairly young and dynamic field studied by an international community of researchers. Most of the workshop attendees will be early-career mathematicians; the schedule is designed to maximize the interactions among young researchers, as well as to give them extended contact with leading experts in the field. A website for the conference can be found at http://bcc.impan.pl/12Young/
This grant supported the first Young Geometric Group Theory (YGGT) meeting, which was held in Bedlewo, Poland on January 9-13, 2012 with the cooperation of several Polish funding agencies. This was an international meeting attended mostly by graduate students in geometric group theory and neighboring fields. The main scientific program included four mini-courses by leading researchers and seven research talks by promising postdoctoral scholars. Over 100 people attended, far outpacing our original plans for the conference, and it was such a success that YGGT 2 was held in January 2013 in Haifa, Israel, and YGGT 3 is planned for 2014 in Luminy, France. The minicourse speakers were Yves Benoist (Paris-XI), Ruth Charney (Brandeis), Cornelia Drutu (Oxford), and Mark Feighn (Rutgers-Newark). The research lectures were given by Michael Bjorklund (Zurich), Mathieu Carette (Louvain), Thomas Koberda (Harvard), Johanna Mangahas (Brown), Piotr Nowak (Warsaw), Patrick Reynolds (Illinois), and Jing Tao (Utah). The meeting provided an excellent opportunity for learning and networking and international collaboration in a young and vibrant field, which combines geometry, topology, and group theory with elements of combinatorics and analytic techniques. The research area has well-established connections to computer science and can be expected to have many more applications in the future.
