This award will provide partial support for the featured speakers and for some graduate students to attend the 1999 Spring Topology Conference hosted by the University of Utah with the help of Brigham Young University. This conference, one of a series held annually at different institutions around the country, is now in its 33rd year and has established itself as perhaps the largest and certainly one of the most successful annual topology conferences in the U.S. Its traditional emphasis has been broadened in recent years to include dynamical systems. Still more recently an emphasis on newer topics in geometric topology has been accelerated, and this will most definitely again be the case in 1999. The general format will be plenary (semi-expository) talks on the three mornings of the conference, followed in the afternoons by 3-4 special sessions consisting of invited one-hour talks and shorter contributed talks. The number of invited featured speakers is 22, and the total number of registered speakers is 67, according to the final preconference version of the conference website. The featured talks will be in geometric topology, manifold theory, geometric group theory, large scale geometry, continuum theory, dynamical systems, and set theoretic topology. Participation by younger mathematicians, by women, and by underrepresented minorities has been encouraged, the first two with notable success. In fact, four of the featured speakers are women. ***
