The "International Conference on Groups and Semigroups" will take place June 11-14, 2013 at Bar Ilan University in Israel. The aim of this conference is to stimulate cooperative research among group theorists and semigroup theorists who are using related techniques in the geometric, combinatorial, and dynamical aspects of the theories. Research in both group theory and semigroup theory has burgeoned in recent years, with many new tools and ideas connecting these fields to topology, geometry, dynamical systems, symbolic computation, and combinatorics. The conference will feature invited talks by several of the leading researchers in these fields, highlighting new developments using geometric, combinatorial and dynamical methods to study algorithmic and asymptotic problems in groups and semigroups. The proceedings of the conference will be published in a special issue of the International Journal of Algebra and Computation.
Group theory and semigroup theory are central areas of modern algebra that have close connections with diverse areas of mathematics including topology, geometry and formal language theory, as well as many applications in the physical and computational sciences. Recent developments in group theory and semigroup theory have made use of a wide variety of mathematical tools from geometry, combinatorics and symbolic dynamics. The aim of this conference is to bring together several of the world's leading experts in the use of these techniques to stimulate cooperative research in these fields. Invited talks will be given by senior researchers from the US, Canada, Israel, Russia, and several European countries, and there will be open problem and discussion sessions involving interaction between senior researchers and junior mathematicians and graduate students. Details of the conference may be found on the conference website at www.math.vanderbilt.edu/~msapir/stuart/main.html.
The goal of this project was to organize a high level conference aimed at stimulating cooperative research among group theorists and semigroup theorists who are using related techniques. The conference highlighted new developments in these fields by researchers using geometric, combinatorial and dynamics methods in studying algorithmic and asymptotic problems in groups and semigroups. The conference was held at Bar Ilan University, Israel, from June 11-14, 2013. There were 45-minute talks by 18 prominent researchers in group theory and semigroup theory (Jorge Almeida, Porto; Jean-Camille Birget, Rutgers-Camden; Volker Diekert, Stuttgart; Robert Gray, Lisbon; Mark Kambites, Manchester; Olga Kharlampovich, SUNY; Markus Lohrey, Leipzig; Alex Lubotzky, Hebrew Univ; Alexander Ol'Shanskii, Vanderbilt; Jean-Eric Pin, CNRS Paris VII; John Rhodes, Berkeley; Luis Ribes, Carleton Univ; Eliahu Rips, Hebrew Univ; Pedro Silva, Porto; Anne Schilling, UC Davis; Lev Shneerson, CUNY; Benjamin Steinberg, CUNY; Mikhail Volkov, Ural Federal Univ, Russia. There were approximately 50 other participants, including the conference organizers (John Meakin, Eugene Plotkin, Mark Sapir, Benjamin Steinberg, Gregory Soifer and Pascal Weil). There were three lively open discussion/problem sessions on the topics "Connections and contrasts between groups and semigroups", "Linear and transformation representations of semigroups", and "Finite semigroups and languages". There were approximately 70 participants, including around 20 young mathematicians (postdocs and graduate students) who participated in the conference, including in the open problem/discussion sessions. There was significant interaction between senior established research leaders and young mathematicians at the conference, both in the context of the formal program of the conference and in informal conversation during breaks and social events. The conference spawned several new results that are being collected in a special issue of the International Journal of Algebra and Computation. In addition, abstracts of the main invited talks are posted on the conference website www.math.vanderbilt.edu/~msapir/stuart/main.html.
