This award will provide support for three years for the Valley Geometry Seminar, an activity of Five Colleges, Inc.; the organizers of the seminar include faculty from Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The activity focuses on a weekly series of lectures given by local speakers or experts from other colleges and universities; visits will last from one day to one week. During some semesters, the seminar will center on a single topic; one miniconference will be held each year. Topics for the seminars and miniconferences may include string theory, minimal surfaces, intersection homology, partial differential equations and Riemannian geometry, Teichmuller theory, and mixed Hodge theory. The main goal of this activity is to enhance the research atmosphere in the Five College area and to encourage the research activities of the seminar participants.
