The proposal is to support US-based participants in the conference "Extremal Problems in Complex and Real Analysis," which will be held at Peoples Friendship University of Russia, Moscow, Russia, on May 22-26, 2007. The unifying theme of the conference is the role that solutions of extremal problems play in various areas of function-theoretic research, such as Banach spaces of analytic functions and function-related operator theory and the interplay between approximation theory and complex and harmonic analysis.
The goal of the conference is twofold: it has an educational component and a research component. There will be three minicourses given by B.Bojanov (Bulgarian Academy of Science and University of Sophia), P.Duren (University of Michigan), and E.Saff (Vanderbilt University). Each minicourse will target a wide audience, including advanced graduate students. In addition, there will be invited research talks and shorter contributed research talks. It is expected that the conference will be attended by a large, internationally diverse group of experts in the field, with a special emphasis placed on participation by junior faculty, postdocs, and advanced graduate students.