The award funds a conference "Groups, Computation, and Geometry" at Pingree Park, a campus of Colorado State University, June 9-13, 2014. Building on the successes of an earlier conference, held at the same location in 2004, the broad goal of the meeting is to bring together researchers in the closely related fields of computational group theory and finite geometries. The scientific content of the conference is designed to explore known and emerging connections between a broad range of topics, including scientific computing, combinatorics, group theory, and theoretical computer science, with a view both to providing answers to open theoretical questions and to investigating practical applications. Historically, the interplay between practical and theoretical concerns has led to advances on both fronts, and cross-paradigm collaboration of this type will feature prominently at the conference. Further programming details may be found at the conference website: www.math.colostate.edu/~hulpke/pingree/index.html.
Group theory is often described as the algebraic study of symmetry in the abstract. Group theory arises and is used in a wide variety of other fields, including solid state physics, chemistry (crystallography), coding theory, and cryptography. Geometry has always played a crucial role in understanding the structure of groups, and over the last forty years machine computations have been increasingly important to developments in both fields. The subject of the conference is the interaction between theoretical questions concerning groups and geometries and algorithmic questions arising from extensive machine computation with these fundamental objects.
