Conference: 2023 Redbud Topology Conference

This award provides support for two iterations of the Redbud Geometry/Topology Conference, the first of which will be held March 31st - April 2nd, 2023 at the University of Oklahoma. The conference will focus on the interplay between mapping class groups and discrete subgroups of Lie groups. This event is part of an ongoing series of conferences held alternately at universities in Arkansas and Oklahoma, intended to increase interaction and collaboration among young and senior mathematicians in the area. It will feature prominent speakers, from across North America and the United Kingdom, presenting their latest research, as well as a graduate student workshop. The 2023 Redbud Geometry/Topology Conference will focus on mapping class groups of surfaces, outer automorphism groups of free groups, discrete subgroups of lattices and their interactions. In particular, talks will discuss how these groups relate in terms of their homology and rigidity properties. The invited speakers are Tara Brendle (University of Glasgow), Alan Reid (Rice University), Rita Jiménez Rolland (Instituto de Matemáticas, UNAM, representación Oaxaca), Nathan Broaddus (The Ohio State University), Lei Chen (University of Maryland, College Park), Rylee Lyman (Rutgers University, Newark), Daniel Studenmund (Binghamton University), and Richard Wade (University of Oxford). The conference begins with a workshop designed to enhance the experience of graduate students and junior researchers by providing relevant background information and introductions to the topics of the conference. Specifically, the workshop will feature expository talks by Tara Brendle, Alan Reid, and Rita Jiménez Rolland. More information is available at the conference website: https://redbud.math.ou.edu/spring-2023/. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.