Mathematics researchers from US institutions will attend an international Conference on Vector Bundles, to be held in Madrid, Spain, for the period June 16-20, 2008. The conference will serve as the 2008 annual meeting of the Vector Bundles on Algebraic Curves (VBAC) group, an international network of mathematicians working on research questions related to vector bundles and their moduli spaces. The meeting will also honor the 70th birthday of Professor S. Ramanan, a pioneer in the subject, and will form part of a Semester on Moduli Spaces organized by a consortium of Spanish mathematics research centers.
Vector bundles and their associated moduli spaces stands at the crossroads of several areas of mathematics, involving ideas from algebraic geometry, topology, differential geometry and gauge theory. They have strong connections with theoretical physics, where the interaction between geometry and string theory has sparked major advances in both disciplines. After algebraic varieties themselves, vector bundles are probably the next most studied objects in algebraic geometry. The speakers and participants invited to the conference described in this proposal include many of the pre-eminent experts in the field.
