The award provides support to defray the expenses of US participants in the "Special Meeting: Focus Program on Whitney Problems". The program will consist of three activities (a 7-day workshop; a graduate course; and a lecture series) that will take place August 27 through September 3, 2012, at the Fields Institute for Research in the Mathematical Sciences in Toronto (Canada). The special meeting is focused on some of the most vibrant developments in function theory related to the celebrated Whitney extension and trace problems for classes of smooth functions. These include new analytic and geometric methods in the study of Lipschitz structures on finite sets, extension and trace problems for functions in Sobolev spaces, simultaneous extensions of Lipschitz functions from subsets of metric spaces, Helly-type Lipschitz selection problems, geometric descriptions of Sobolev extension domains, etc. New developments in these areas will continue to have an impact on a broad range of fields, including function theory, geometric analysis and complexity.
NSF funding for this program will be used to pay for the expenses of US based participant support, with priority given to graduate students, post-docs, younger faculty, members of underrepresented groups, and those without their own source of funding. This program will bring together researchers in Analysis, Partial Differential Equations, Geometry,to discuss recent advances related to the Whitney Problem and in particular the overlap between these areas of mathematics. The program will be an opportunity to attract some of the leading experts in function theory, partial differential equations, and harmonic analysis together to discuss this question and related research questions of interest. This program will create an environment in which students and early career researchers could profit from the interaction with such top experts.
