This grant supports the international summer school and conference "Building Bridges: 1st EU/US conference on Automorphic Forms and Related Topics," which will take place July 30 -- August 10, 2012 at RWTH Aachen University (webpage: www.af-bridges.matha.rwth-aachen.de/). Grant funds will be used to enable US-based researchers to participate in this international summer school and meeting.
The theory of automorphic forms is a rich research area with deep links to different fields of mathematics and physics. Current research on automorphic forms is particularly impacted by "Borcherds products and applications," "Modular symbols," and "Theta blocks," the topics of the three mini-courses of the summer school. Each mini-course is led by a team of two internationally established researchers and consists of two 90-minute lectures each morning and problem sessions and homework in the afternoons.The conference will provide an important and timely opportunity for participants to start new collaborations and strengthen existing collaborations. International connections between senior researchers indirectly benefit students and post-docs, who may later visit institutions abroad to give talks, study, or hold visiting positions. Junior participants will be able to start new projects with international experts at a critical stage in their careers.
is a new conference program, which is intended to meet every other year. The conference series is similar to the annual nth Annual Workshop on Automorphic Forms and Related Topics (US-AFW) and provides ample opportunities to junior participants to present alongside internationally recognized experts. The main difference from US-AFW is the focus on trans-Atlantic collaborations and the intent to bring together researchers from the US and Europe to establish a long-lasting research exchange. Furthermore, the new conference program also consists of an international summer school, where junior mathematicians learn important aspects of automorphic forms. During the summer school international experts give several lecture series to provide theoretic background and also lead small discussion groups to work out concrete examples to deepen understanding. The summer school of the 1st EU/US conference on Automorphic Forms and Related Topics took place July 30--August 4, 2012. It consisted of mini-courses on Modular symbols (taught by John Cremona and Nils Skoruppa), Borcherds products and applications (taught by Jan Bruinier and Richard Hill), and Theta blocks (taught by Cris Poor and Don Zagier). The first two mini-courses had two 90-minute lectures each morning and problem sessions and homework in the afternoons. The mini-course on Borcherds products also had additional 90-minute lectures in the afternoons. The mini-course on theta blocks consisted of four 90-minute lectures each day, where each lecture was a mix of theory and exercises. Lecture notes and some of the exercises of the mini-courses are available at the summer school website: www.math.unt.edu/$sim$ richter/afbridges/summerschool/lecturenotes.html The 25 summer school participants were selected from a pool of applicants and included 14 participants from Europe, 10 from the USA, and 1 from Canada. Several participants provided feedback to the organizers on their experiences of the summer school. That feedback was extremely positive and participants were grateful to be able to learn from international experts on automorphic forms. The conference following the summer school took place August 6--August 10, 2012. The 90 participants of the conference included 48 from Europe, 32 from the USA, 7 from Asia, 1 from Canada, 1 from Chile, and 1 from Nigeria. There were 46 talks on various aspects of automorphic forms.
