This proposal will support U.S.-based participants attending the ``Young Geometric Group Theory'' meeting to be held at the Centre International de Recontres Mathematiques (CIRM) at Luminy, France on January 20--24, 2014. There will be four senior speakers giving mini-courses on fundamental topics, as well as several outstanding postdocs giving short talks on their work. The mini-courses and short talks will be on subjects central to geometric group theory, but will also explore connections with other fields, including dynamics, logic, topology, algebraic geometry and measure theory. The topics of the in-depth mini-courses include dynamics and circle packings, hyperbolic geometry and expanders, and Thompson's groups. The shorter talks will cover various topics in CAT(0) geometry, hyperbolic groups, Teichmuller theory, and other areas of current interest.
Geometric group theory is a young and dynamic field of mathematics, studied by an international community of researchers. Most of the workshop attendees will be early-career mathematicians; the schedule is designed to maximize the interactions among young researchers, as well as to give them extended contact with leading experts in the field. A website for the conference can be found at: http://math.univ-lille1.fr/~kassel/yggt3.html
The "Young Geometric Group Theory 3" (YGGT3) meeting was held January 20--24, 2014 at the Centre International de Recontres Mathematiques (CIRM) at Luminy, France. As the name suggests, this was the third iteration of a very successful conference series, which aims to bring together a fairly large number of graduate students and early-career researchers with a smaller group of more senior experts in the burgeoning field of geometric group theory. The time is divided between mini-courses by the experts, shorter talks by the junior mathematicians, and discussions. Geometric group theory is a young and dynamic field of mathematics, which uses geometric and topological methods to solve algebraic problems. The solutions to these problems often reverberate in the fields which inspired the methods. A recent example is the geometric group theoretic methods used in Agol's solution to the virtual Haken conjecture. This particular conference brought together about 100 mathematicians from around the world. This year's experts were Pierre-Emmanuel Caprace, Etienne Ghys, Hee Oh, and Juan Souto. Caprace spoke on metric geometry and locally compact groups; Oh spoke on dynamical applications to the study of circle packings; Souto spoke on the geometry and topology of hyperbolic 3-manifolds; Ghys gave an eclectic sequence of lectures on particular groups and their mysteries. More details, including abstracts of all the talks and research statements from most of the 96 registered participants, can be found at the website for the conference: http://math.univ-lille1.fr/~kassel/yggt3 This grant supported 17 US-based participants at YGGT3. Fourteen graduate students, two post-docs, and one of the senior speakers were supported. Over one-third of those supported by this grant were female mathematicians.
