9626801 Latiolais This award provides partial support for the fall 1996 Workshop on the Symbiosis of Topology and Group Theory. The award is to Portland State University, but faculty and graduate students from the University of Oregon and Oregon State University are heavily involved as well. Additional participants, including graduate students, postdocs, and faculty investigators, represent other states and foreign countries. Previous workshops of the same nature include a 1993 conference in Oregon and earlier workshops in Luttach, Italy. The site of this year's workshop is Mazama, Washington, in the Northern Cascade Mountains. The workshop has been planned for nine days beginning September 30, and this duration allows the detailed program to evolve somewhat in response to preferences expressed by particpants upon their arrival. Those invited have expertise in quantum groups, low dimensional topology, combinatorial homotopy, algebraic K-theory, and combinatorial group theory. The goal is to obtain progress in areas relating to the application of quantum groups as topological obstruction groups, new classification schemes for manifolds and 2-complexes, new computational methods for the second homotopy group, further inroads on the Kervaire-Laudenbach conjecture, application of the tools of automatic groups to low dimensional homotopy theory, and issues relating to Whitehead's asphericity conjecture. Past experience suggests that unexpected connections will be made and that these will be at least as significant as any that could be foreseen. ***
