This grant supports travel for US participants (primarily graduate students and postdocs) to attend the conference Poisson 2012, to be held in Utrecht University, the Netherlands, July 30-Aug. 3, 2012, and the "Gone fishing: Workshop in Poisson geometry II", to be held at University of California, Los Angeles, November 17-18, 2012. There will also be a "school" during the week preceding Poisson 2012 (July 23-27, 2012) to prepare such participants for the conference. The aim of both meetings is to bring together mathematicians and mathematical physicists who work in diverse areas, with common interests in Poisson geometry. With roots in classical mechanics about 200 years ago and the work of Sophus Lie about a century ago, the subject of Poisson geometry was crystallized through work of Kirillov and Lichnerowicz in the 1970's and has been particularly driven by the program of "deformation quantization", in which Poisson structures appear as the first deviation from commutativity in families of associative algebras. On the geometric side, there have been recent advances in the classification of Poisson structures, both up to (local) isomorphism, and up to the coarser relation of Morita equivalence. Poisson geometry provides a very important bridge between mathematics and physics and between classical and quantum physics. Although Poisson geometry has a core of internal results, it is an interdisciplinary subject. Subjects where Poisson geometry plays an essential role include string theory, symplectic geometry and topology, deformation theory, representation theory, algebraic geometry, integrable Hamiltonian systems, and field theory.
Poisson 2012, whose full title is "Poisson Geometry in Mathematics and Physics," is the eighth in a biannual series which brings together mathematicians and mathematical physicists with common interests in Poisson geometry and its applications. Speakers at Poisson 2012 have been chosen not only for the importance of their results but also for their ability to communicate them to a broad audience of mathematicians and physicists. The conference will be preceded by a short school designed to prepare the audience for the more specialized talks to come. Conference proceedings will be published in a manner which makes them accessible at low (or no) cost to a wide readership, in order to stimulate further study and research in the rapidly growing area of Poisson geometry. The ``Gone fishing" workshop aims to bring together US based leading experts and young researchers in subjects related to Poisson geometry to encourage more interaction and cross fertilization between different fields. It provides an excellent opportunity for US based young scientists to exchange ideas and promote possible collaborations.
Detailed information about Poisson 2012 may be found at www.projects.science.uu.nl/poisson2012/Home.php and the ``Gone fishing workshops" at www.math.wustl.edu/~xtang/gone-fishing.htm Information is also available at http://poissongeometry.org/
