A conference entitled "Low Dimensional Topology, Knots, and Orderable Groups" will be held at the Centre International de Rencontres Mathematiques in Luminy, Marseille, France, from July 1 to 5, 2013. The aim of the conference is to explore connections between topology and orderability properties of groups, especially in the context of the theory of three-dimensional manifolds and knots. The conference will honor Dale Rolfsen's contributions to these areas on the occasion of his 70th birthday. One-hour talks will be given by Stephen Bigelow, Michel Boileau, Danny Calegari, Julien Marche, Andres Navas, Peter Ozsvath, Luisa Paoluzzi, Dale Rolfsen, Dylan Thurston, and Bert Wiest. In addition there will be twenty half-hour talks.
Three-dimensional topology is the study of the large-scale structure of spaces that are locally like the ordinary three-dimensional space in which we live. The subject has seen huge advances in recent years, notably Perelman's proof of the Poincare Conjecture. In another direction, deep connections between the topics mentioned above are beginning to emerge, and the aim of the conference is to further explore these connections and encourage cross-fertilization of ideas by bringing together international experts from the different areas involved. It will also provide an opportunity for early-career mathematicians from the US to interact with other researchers, both senior and junior, and to discuss and present their own work in a stimulating environment.
The url for the conference website is http://thales.math.uqam.ca/~rolfsenfest/
Technological advances are driven by scientific discovery, and science in its turn is based on mathematics. At any given time, mathematics comprises a wide array of subdisciplines, ranging from abstract "pure" mathematics to "applied" branches that are more directly motivated by scientific applications. However, mathematics is a complex organic structure, with the various subdisciplines feeding off and influencing each other, and must be nurtured as a whole, for as history has shown over and over again, it is impossible to predict exactly which parts of the enterprise will turn out to be important for science. The project was an international conference "Low dimensional topology, knots, and orderable groups", held from July 1-5 2014 at the Centre International de Rencontres Math´ematiques (CIRM) in Luminy, Marseille (France). The aim of the conference was to bring together a community of world-class researchers and early career mathematicians whose research interests are connected with the interplay between three areas of pure mathematics, topology, ordered groups, and dynamics. Low-dimensional topology is concerned with the study of geometric structures of dimensions 3 and 4, a study which has obvious relevance to the understanding of our physical universe. The last ten years have seen groundbreaking advances in this field, the most celebrated being Grigori Perelman’s proof of the over one hundred year-old Poincar´e Conjecture about the nature of possible 3-dimensional spaces. Meanwhile, ideas stemming originally from physics have given rise to dramatic new insights into the mathematical theory of 3- and 4-dimensional phenomena. In separate developments, tantalizing relations between geometry in three dimensions and purely algebraic ideas about orders on groups have been uncovered. The goal of the conference was to further the exploration of these connections and to facilitate cross-fertilization between the topology community and the community of specialists in the relevant algebraic areas. The organizers received applications from 130 individuals to attend the conference. Because of the limitation on the number of people that can be accommodated at CIRM, the scientific committee eventually selected 80 participants. There were also 10 invited plenary speakers, from the US, Canada, France and Chile. In addition to the 1-hour plenary lectures there were 24 30-minute talks, chosen by the scientific committee from those proposed by the participants. The program was deliberately chosen to allow time for informal discussions. As a result of this format, and the high level of the plenary speakers and the selected participants, the conference was extremely successful. 1
