This award provides funding to help defray the expenses of participants in the conference "Operator Theory Operator Algebras: GPOTS 2013" that will be held from May 21-25, 2013, on the campus of the University of California-Berkeley.
This event is the thirty-third installment of the Great Plains Operator Theory Symposium (GPOTS), a conference series that annually brings together a diverse group of mathematicians whose primary research interests are in operator theory or operator algebras. The theme of the 2013 event is the mathematical legacy of William B. Arveson (1934-2011), who was a pioneer in the operator theory/operator algebra field. Among the main topics to be discussed by speakers at the meeting are the following: non-self-adjoint operator algebras; complete positivity, complete boundedness, and quantum information; actions by groups of automorphisms of operator algebras. The conference program provides ample opportunity for graduate students, postdocs, and other young scientists to present their work.
From a modest beginning in 1981, the Great Plains Operator Theory Symposium (GPOTS) has evolved into a major annual conference (no longer limited geographically to the Great Plains) devoted to the important topic of operators on vector spaces and their applications. The 33rd annual Great Plains Operator Theory Symposium was held on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, from May 21 to May 25, 2013. The project of the NSF grant was to provide some financial support to cover the expenses of this conference, primarily by partially reimbursing many of the participants for their travel expenses. Usually each GPOTS is partially focused in some direction. For GPOTS-2013 the focus was on operator algebras of various kinds, and in the application of these algebras to such subjects as quantum physics, dynamical systems, and harmonic analysis. There were 10 Plenary Lectures of 50 minutes each by leading researchers, together with 78 talks of 10-minute each. Most of the talks presented new discoveries that significantly advanced our understanding of the topics of the conference. Of the 78 participants who gave 10-minute talks, 21 were post-docs, 13 were doctoral students, 9 were women, 8 were asian, and 4 were hispanic. In particular, GPOTS continued its tradition of being one of the major conferences where many junior scientists in the field can present their research in front of an international audience. Judging from the past, many of these junior scientists can be expected to develop into leading researchers. The conference was very well attended. There were 143 registered participants for the conference. We believe that there were a significant number of local graduate students and post-docs who did not register but did attend some of the talks. The participants were quite diverse. Of the 143 registered participants, 25 were post-docs, 35 were students, 20 were women, 16 were asian, and 8 were hispanic. The general topics of the conference provide important mathematical foundationsfor important parts of the advanced technology that increasingly pervades our civilization. Some of these parts are based on quantum physics as used in areas such as nanotechnology and potentially quantum computation. Other parts involve harmonic analysis as used in much of our digital technology such as cell phones and GPS devices. Other parts involve quantum dynamical systems as used for example in chemistry and increasingly in biochemistry. The activities of this conference will help to strengthen our country’s pool of scientific personnel with expertise in these topics. The results of the future research of the participants, influenced by this conference, should eventually contribute to our country’s technological and economic development.
