9802861 Guilbault This award provides partial support for a workshop in geometric topology to be held in each of the summers of 1998, 1999, and 2000. The 1998 workshop will be held in Park City, Utah, with Brigham Young University acting as host, with Professor David G. Wright as the local organizer, and with Professor Steven C. Ferry of SUNY-Binghamton as the principal lecturer. The 1999 workshop will be held at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the 2000 workshop will be held at Colorado College. These workshops belong to a well established series that began in the 1980's. Geometric topology treats the structure and properties of low- dimensional topological manifolds. Previous workshops in this series have focused on such major developments in the field as the solution of the knot-complement problem by Andrew Casson and John Luecke. The principal lectures on that occasion (1989) were given by Luecke, whose solution confirmed the conjecture that a knot in 3-dimensional space is completely determined by its complement (the residual space remaining after a worm has eaten its way along the knot, leaving a knot- shaped tunnel behind). The workshops' primary goal is to provide mathematicians with active research programs but limited support an opportunity to discuss their work with others in the field. Another important goal is to expand the interests of the participants by having a nationally recognized expert discuss an area that is related to, but outside, the focus of their current work. A third goal is to provide a serious but informal research atmosphere in which gradate students in geometric topology can meet and learn from others in the field. ***
