"The 43rd Barrett Memorial Lectures - On the Proof of the Wilmore Conjecture" will be held at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, on May 4-5, 2013. The Willmore Conjecture was one of the most important open problems in geometric analysis, dating back almost 50 years. The conjecture was recently solved by Fernando Marques of IMPA, Brazil, and Andre Neves of Imperial College in the UK, who will be the speakers at the conference.
The annual Barrett Memorial Lectures at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is one of the longest-standing series of mathematical survey lectures in the country. This year, the conference will focus on the recent solution of a well-known problem in Geometric Analysis that dates back almost half a century. Support from the National Science Foundation will be combined with support from the University of Tennessee and the UT Mathematics Department to fund travel of participants to the conference. First consideration for travel funding will be given to participants who are within 5 years of earning (or expecting to earn) a PhD in Mathematics. Members of under-represented groups will be especially encouraged to apply for funding. The high profile nature of the conjecture, its elusive proof, and its relatively simple statement, should attract participants from various areas of mathematics and closely related fields such as physics. www.math.utk.edu/barrett/index.html
at the University of Tennessee are one of the longest running annual mathematics conferences in the Southeast. The conference was held May 4-5, 2013, and the subject of the conference was the recent proof of the Willmore Conjecture. The Willmore conjecture was proposed nearly half a century ago by Tom Willmore, and is a deceptively simple inequality involving the so-called Willmore energy of a compact, orientable surface in Euclidean space. The conjecture was solved in 2012 by Fernando Marques of the Instituto Nacional de Mathamatica Pura e Aplicada (IMPA) in Brazil, and Andre Neves of Imperial College in the UK. At the Barrett Lectures, Professors Marques and Neves delivered four lectures, while additional time was allowed for discussion among participants and the speakers. As is often the case with solutions to long-standing problems in mathematics, the methods used to solve the Willmore Conjecture are powerful and innovative, and will likely continue to have an impact on solving other deep problems in mathematics. The 2013 Barrett Lectures provided the 43 registered participants –graduate students and established researchers– with an introduction to the Willmore Conjecture, followed by presentation of the proof of the conjecture, with intermingled discussion among participants. The proceedings were also videotaped and made available free online at the conference website, which will be maintained indefinitely: www.math.utk.edu/~fernando/barrett13/ Funding from the NSF was supplemented by an equal amount of local funding from the Department of Mathematics and the University of Tennessee. Special efforts were made to attract and support early-career mathematicians, graduate students, and especially women and other members of underrepresented groups.
