Conferences
The department has had a particularly active year hosting research conferences. This is a great way to show off Athens and the UGA Mathematics Department to the international mathematics community. The intensity of mathematical energy vibrating through the halls of Boyd during these conferences is palpable. What a great experience for our students and faculty!
UGA Sage Conference: Quadratic Forms and Lattices
February 28 - March 2, 2009
The conference brought together researchers from around the world to discuss the state-of-the-art techniques for computing with quadratic forms over the integers, rationals, and number fields, with the freely available open source SAGE computer algebra system. The talks covered both the theoretical aspects of the area (John Voight, "Computing with Quaternion Algebras"; Gabrielle Nebe, "Buildings for orthogonal groups"; Marty Weissman, "Automorphic forms for exceptional groups"); and relevant computational issues (talks by William Stein and Michael Abshoff, "Introduction to SAGE" and "Sage Development"). The conference was attended by several UGA faculty and graduate students, and provided a good introduction to the use of computers in research mathematics. There were also hands on "coding sessions" each evening where speakers, SAGE developers and participants worked on writing SAGE code to solve interesting problems. The conference was organized by Jonathan Hanke, and funded jointly by his startup funds and with funding from William Stein's grant.
Georgia Topology Conference
May 19 - 23, 2010
As many of you know, the topology conference has been an annual event at UGA since 1961. For the first time in several years the focus of the conference was on algebraic topology. Around half of the talks were on the common theme of the Goodwillie-Weiss embedding calculus and its application to spaces of knots. Tom Goodwillie (Brown University) gave a series of three introductory talks on the embedding calculus at the graduate student level. Nick Kuhn (University of Virginia) also gave a series of introductory talks on periodic localization, generalized Tate cohomology, and infinite loop spaces. The conference was considerably larger than our typical annual conference with almost 70 people attending some of the lectures.
The primary organizers were Michael Ching who has been at UGA since 2007 and our VIGRE post-doc Niles Johnson. The conference received generous support from NSF and UGA.
Southeastern Lie Theory Conference
May 22 - 24, 2010
This was the second of a three year conference series sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The main organizing committee for the conference series consists of Kailash Misra (North Carolina State), Daniel Nakano (UGA), and Brian Parshall (University of Virginia). For the UGA conference, Brian Boe, William Graham and Nakano were the local organizers.
The conference featured seven prominent U.S. mathematicians working in Lie and Representation Theory. There were 73 participants, including 37 graduate students from around the country. Prior to the conference, there was a two-week summer school on geometry and representation theory sponsored by the VIGRE grant. We would like to thank Heather Adams for her efforts in making all the logistical arrangements for the participants.
Compact Moduli and Vector Bundles Conference
October 21 - 24, 2010
Over a hundred participants from across the U.S. and other countries, including many graduate students and recent Ph.D.s, came to study this cutting edge topic in algebraic geometry. The twenty speakers came from the U.S., Germany, India, Italy, Korea, the Netherlands, and Japan, and included some of the most recognizable names in algebraic geometry in the world, among them seven ICM speakers, as well as new rising stars in the subject.
The conference was organized by Valery Alexeev, Angela Gibney, Elham Izadi and David Swinarski. The conference was supported by the NSF, the Math Department (through alumni contributions), and UGA's Offices of the President and Vice President for Research.
The success of these conferences is due in no small part to the extremely able and competent support of the departmental staff: Laura Ackerley, Christy McDonald, Julie McEver, Connie Poore, and Gail Suggs.
