This grant will support the participation of US mathematicians at a conference on Rigidity and Flexibility in Dimensions 2, 3 and 4 at the Centre International de Recontres Mathématiques in Luminy, France, May 14-18, 2012. This conference will focus on recent developments in the deformation theory of geometric structures and topics will include Teichmüller theory, 3-manifolds, Kleinian groups, cone manifolds, hyperbolic 4-manifolds and representations of surface groups.
This conference will bring together international researchers from a diverse array of subject areas in geometry and topology. Leading experts will give presentations on cutting edge research in their fields. These presentations will expose graduate students and early career mathematicians to some of the most important new developments in these areas. The intermingling of subject matter will encourage collaborations betweenresearchers in different areas. The conference website can be found at www.math.utah.edu/rigflex.
The project helped to fund the participation of U.S. based researchers in a conference on the study of geometric structures in low dimensions, with a focus on rigidity and flexibility. This conference was held May 14 through 18, 2012, in Luminy, France, and over 70 mathematicians from around the world participated. Major goals of the project include first, under intellectual merit, to bring together a distinguished group of international speakers to discuss recent developments in the area. Understanding spaces of geometric structures has been a central theme in low dimensional topology for decades, and there are many open questions and much active ongoing research on this topic, some of it from very different directions of approach. By bringing together experts, we hoped to encourage dissemination of results and to encourage new collaborations, particularly by those working on similar problems but from traditionally different areas. Under broader impacts, one primary goal was to expose graduate students and early career mathematicians to the important new developments in these research areas, again with the hope of stimulating interest and possible new collaborations, and to attract and encourage early career mathematicians to work in these active areas. We also strived to encourage participation by groups that are under-represented in mathematics.
