This award provides support to defray expenses of participants in the 2012 meeting of the West Coast Operator Algebra Seminar (WCOAS), which will be held at the University of Oregon during the period October 20-21, 2012. The 2012 WCOAS will provide attendees the opportunity to hear of progress in most of the following fields: free probability; subfactors; operator spaces; quantum groups; semigroups of endomorphisms; classification of C*-algebras; noncommutative geometry; graph C*-algebras; and noncommutative dynamical systems. The weekend seminar will feature approximately ten talks on current topics, delivered by a mix of junior and senior researchers.
WCOAS is the one annual forum addressing the community of operator algebraists in the western United States. It provides an opportunity for researchers to disseminate their own results, furnishes an opportunity for researchers to learn about recent research of others and to stay abreast of current work, and fosters collaborative research by giving researchers the opportunity to meet and discuss their work with one another. WCOAS encourages and nurtures graduate students and postdocs by giving them the opportunity to present their own work, learn about recent work, and meet established researchers in operator algebras. It helps create and maintain a cohesive regional community of operator algebraists, and fosters connections between the faculty and students at research universities and those at primarily undergraduate institutions.
, held at the University of Oregon. This conference was part of a series held once a year in western North America, on operator algebras, an active area of mathematics with connections to quantum mechanics. There were 11 talks, including three by graduate students and three by young people who did not yet have permanent positions. There were over 40 participants, mostly from the US but also including participants from Canada, Japan, and Britain. A record of the conference can be found at the conference website, "http://pages.uoregon.edu/ncp/Conferences/WCOAS2012/WCOAS2012.html". The abstracts of the talks are at "http://pages.uoregon.edu/ncp/Conferences/WCOAS2012/Abstracts.pdf". About half the speakers used slides, and these are linked at "http://pages.uoregon.edu/ncp/Conferences/WCOAS2012/Schedule.html" (the conference schedule page). The conference presentations addressed several areas of operator algebras in which there is considerable current interest and activity. There were talks making connections with at least three other areas: mathematical physics, wavelets, and the theory of finite groups. There were informal discussions among the participants, both about the topics of the presentations and about other important topics in operator algebras. More than a third of the participants were graduate students. This conference provided opportunities for them to meet other graduate students, mostly from other universities, and to see a broad view of the kinds of research being done in operator algebras. Both these are hard to get from within one's own university.
