Profs. T. Branson, P. Jorgensen, and F. Radulescu will host an NSF/CBMS conference on "Spectral Problems in Geometry and Arithmetic" at the University of Iowa August 18-22, 1997, featuring Prof. Peter Sarnak (Princeton University) as principal speaker. The conference is aimed at making accessible to researchers, potential researchers, and graduate students in the region important and exciting current work on the spectral theory of Laplacians and Hecke operators, the Selberg and Ramanujan conjectures, as well as applications to quantum chaos and other physical issues. Prof. Sarnak is an internationally recognized expert on these topics. Despite their importance, the topics of the conference are sufficiently new and background-intensive that special efforts are needed to broaden the pool of researchers able to understand and work on them. For example, these topics are seldom reached in graduate coursework at all but the most elite universities. The organizers plan to draw on extensive contacts developed over recent years by the University of Iowa to ensure the broadest possible participation.
