Abstract Lin/Ruan/Zhang 970-5842 This award will provide partial support for US participants in the third international conference on operator algebras and operator theory to be held in Shanghai, China, July 4-9 at the East China Normal University. The host university will partially support the local expense of the foreign participants. The previous two conferences, in 1967 and 1980, contributed significantly to the development of the area. The general area of mathematics of this project has its basis in the theory of algebras of operators on Hilbert space. Operators can be thought of as finite or infinite matrices of complex numbers. Special types of operators are often put together in an algebra , naturally called an operator algebra. These seemingly abstract objects have a surprising variety of applications. For example, they play a key role in knot theory, which in turn is currently being used to study the structure of DNA.
