The Southwest Center for Arithmetic Geometry was founded in 1997 with grant support from the National Science Foundation, and renewed in 2002, 2006, and 2009. The main activity of the Southwest Center is the Arizona Winter School (AWS), an annual meeting which has become a prominent national event, and which provides high-level training and research experience for graduate students in arithmetic geometry. The AWS is an intensive five-day meeting, organized around a different central topic each year, which features a set of courses by leading and emerging experts. The AWS is not a traditional conference: the speakers organize courses of four lectures, with lecture notes provided in advance, and propose projects for graduate students to work on during the meeting. Each speaker hosts working sessions nightly during the meeting, and on the last day the students present their findings to the entire group. The result is a particularly intense and focused five days of mathematical activity for both students and speakers. Recent Winter School topics have included non-archimedean geometry, transcendence theory, and quadratic forms. Upcoming AWS topics will be guided by future mathematical developments and the availability of key speakers.
At the Winter School, connections among peers are formed, and mentoring relationships between students and senior researchers are developed. As has been the case at previous Winter Schools, subsequent collaborations between participants at all levels are the norm. Experienced researchers develop new interests and see new connections that lead to important published results; students make concrete strides toward becoming research mathematicians; and post-doctoral assistants gain valuable mentoring experience, which helps to develop their academic careers. The Southwest Center website shares reusable content from the Winter Schools, including lecture notes, project descriptions, and audio and video of lectures. Since our site will contain a thorough record of each Winter School, the dialogues begun at the Winter School will be extended to the greater mathematical community, and the efforts of the Winter School participants will be available to all mathematicians indefinitely.
The Arizona Winter School is an innovative intensive five-day meeting, each year organized around a different central topic in arithmetic geometry, featuring several courses by leading and emerging experts ("an annual pilgrimage," in the words of one participant). The Winter School is the mainactivity of the Southwest Center for Arithmetic Geometry, which was founded in 1997 by a group of seven mathematicians working in the southwest United States, and which has been supported since that time by the National Science Foundation. The special character of the Arizona Winter School comes from its format. Each speaker proposes a project, and a month before the Winter School begins, the speaker is assigned a group of graduate students who work on the project. The speakers also provide lecture notes and a bibliography. During the actual school the speaker and and his or her group of students work every evening onthe assigned project. On the last day of the workshop, the students from each group present their work to the whole school. The result is a particularly intense and focused five days ofmathematical activity (for the students and speakers alike). This project supported the Arizona Winter School for the years 2010 to 2012. The topics in those years were: Number Theory and Dynamics (2010) Stark-Heegner Points (2011) Ramification and Geometry (2012) In the months leading up to the Winter School, each lecturer wrote lecture notes that were posted on the Southwest Center website and distributed to participants in advance of the meeting. The lecture notes remain freely available on the Arizona Winter School website (http://swc.math.arizona.edu), in addition to video of all the lectures from the Winter School. The participation in those Winter Schools was as follows. 2010: there were 121 total participants, of whom 87 were graduate students, 6 were post-docs, 25 were senior faculty, and 3 were undergraduates. Of the graduate students, 22 were women. 2011: this year's school set a record high for AWS attendance (recently eclipsed in 2013) with 172 total participants, of whom 122 were graduate students, 19 were post-docs, 29 were senior faculty, and 2 were undergraduates. Of the graduate students, 22 were women. 2012: there were a 120 total participants, of whom 90 were graduate students, 6 were post-docs, and 23 were senior faculty. Two of the speakers and 20 of the graduate students were women.
