The "International Conference and Workshop on Flat Surfaces of Infinite Type" will take place in the Morelia campus of Mexico's National Autonomous University from July 29 to August 2, 2013. It will be a conference and workshop that is focussed on the dynamics, geometry, and analytical properties of surfaces of infinite type. It will serve as a satellite conference to the first Mathematical Congress of the Americas, which will take place August 5-9 in the city of Guanajuato, Mexico. The conference aims to bring together researchers from different fields who have been studying surfaces of infinite type in order to interact and share the latest advances in their respective fields with the hope of funding an emerging theory tying results in separate fields together. There will be two mini-courses aimed at non-experts and students about recent developments in at surfaces of infinite type: one from the dynamical perspective and the other from the complex analytic perspective.
Flat surfaces of finite type is a very rich and deep topic and it is a point of intersection for many fields of mathematics such as analysis, geometry, and dynamical systems. By "finite type" we mean that such a surface can be described by finitely many parameters. For example, the surfaces of a donut and a pretzel are of finite type; their "finiteness" coming from the fact that the first has one hole, while the latter has (usually) three. The rich theory for flat surfaces of finite type is by now well-understood, so there have been recent developments in trying to understand different aspects of flat surfaces of infinite type. This conference and workshop will serve as a cross-disciplinary platform to exchange ideas and engender collaborations among people investigating different properties of flat surfaces of infinite type as well as to introduce young researchers and students to the latest developments of different fields. The award encourages the participation of graduate students, young researchers, and members of under-represented groups.
The purpose of the award was to help defray the travel costs of US-based researchers traveling to the International Conference and Workshop of Surfaces of Infinite Type held, at the Morelia campus of the Mexican National Autonomous University in Morelia, Mexico, from July 29 to August 2, 2013. This event was a satellite conference of the first Mathematical Congress of the Americas. A total of 16 researchers were supported, 6 of which were graduate students and 3 were postdocs. The purpose of the conference was to bring together, for the first time, researchers in different areas of dynamics and geometry with interests in surfaces of infinite type. Recently there have been independent developments in separate areas, and the aim of the conference was to bring people together to exchange ideas and results in the hope of fostering collaboration between different fields studying different aspects of surfaces of infinite type. By allowing US-based researchers to attend the conference with the grant, the interests of US-based researchers were well-represented and, through their participation, their results and ideas disseminated. The videos for most of the talks have been posted in the conference's YouTube channel for posterity. They are available at the address: www.youtube.com/user/InfSurfMorelia
