This award supports participants in the Texas-Oklahoma Representations and Automorphic Forms (TORA) conference series will take place at the University of North Texas (UNT) in Denton, TX, April 8-10, 2016; at Oklahoma State University (OSU) in Stillwater, OK in Fall 2017; and at the University of Oklahoma (OU) in Norman, OK in Fall 2018. Each TORA conference will feature three plenary guest speakers consisting of two outstanding leading research mathematicians from outside the Oklahoma-Texas region as well as a recent Ph.D. or a graduate student nearing completion of a Ph.D. In addition, regional graduate students and researchers will present their work. These weekend conferences will provide ample opportunities for collaboration and interactions among the students and researchers in the region, specializing in number theory, automorphic forms and representation theory.
Automorphic forms are basic objects of study in modern number theory. The interplay between automorphic forms and representation theory has seen a number of very exciting new developments recently which also fuel applications to several other fields. J. Arthur's work on endoscopic classification of representations of the orthogonal and symplectic groups is an example of such new developments. Research faculty from over a half dozen universities in the Oklahoma and North Texas region work in automorphic forms and representation theory. The TORA conference series has been successful in bringing together researchers from the region and beyond, as well as their students, and propel innovation and exchange. TORA VII-IX will continue this success in collaborations and exchanges not only between institutions, but also among mathematical areas. The webpage for the 2016 conference can be found here www.math.unt.edu/~richter/TORA/TORA7.html.
