The 2009 Georgia International Topology Conference will be held at the University of Georgia in Athens, GA, from May 18 - 29, 2009. Since 1961, topologists at the University of Georgia have organized and hosted a major two week long international topology conference every 8 years. The 1961, 1969, 1977, 1985, 1993 and 2001 conferences came at times when fundamental new ideas were surfacing that set the direction of research in topology in the following years. Our conferences highlighted these ideas and focused attention on new promising directions of research. We aim to do the same with the 2009 conference, by highlighting exciting new developments, including advances in Heegaard Floer homology, contact and symplectic topology, broken Lefschetz fibrations, hyperbolic three-manifolds, applications of Ricci flow, quantum invariants of knots and links, and other new developments.
The purpose of the 2009 conference is to have the most important results obtained during the last few years in geometric topology and related geometry presented to a wide topological audience and to be a place for communication and interchange of new ideas. Our conference has historically generated great interest among established researchers, but also among graduate students and recent PhD's. We have always paid special attention to inviting young researchers in topology to speak. The combination of speakers and topics to be presented will offer students and fresh PhD's a great opportunity to listen to and interact with the leaders in the subject as well as with successful mathematicians at the beginning of their careers. We will publish a proceedings, similar to those published by Prentice-Hall in 1961, Markam in 1969, Academic Press in 1977, Dekker in 1985, AMS and International Press in 1997, and AMS in 2003. Previous proceedings of the Georgia Topology Conference have been among the best of any conference proceedings. To continue the tradition, we will invite all speakers to submit articles, and we will enlist conference participants to help review submitted articles for the proceedings.
