Conference: Tech Topology Summer School 2023

The Tech Topology Summer School, to be held July 24-28, 2023, at the Georgia Institute of Technology is the second installment of a biennial summer school. The 2023 summer school will focus on a fundamental conjecture in low-dimensional topology, called the L-space conjecture, that relates three very different areas within this field. There will be mini-courses introducing these areas, complemented by research talks. Students and postdoctoral researchers will have an opportunity to give five-minute lighting talks to advertise their work to a large audience. There will also be problem sessions where students can get help with material presented in the lectures and other activities geared to stimulate interest and spur collaboration among the participants. The summer school is expected to provide a large group of early career mathematicians with mathematical tools to start contributing to this exciting area of modern research. The Tech Topology Summer School will open with a talk by Cameron Gordon (University of Texas, Austin) on the state of the L-space conjecture, outlining major progress of the past several years. The L-space conjecture posits a relationship between three distinct yet related topics, which will be the focus of the mini-courses taught by Adam Clay (University of Manitoba), Irving Dai (Stanford University), and Rachel Roberts (Washington University in St. Louis). These topics are: Heegaard Floer homology, orderability of fundamental groups, and taut foliations. The mini-courses will be complemented by research talks by Nathan Dunfield (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Jonathan Hanselman (Princeton University), Tao Li (Boston College), and Hannah Turner (Georgia Institute of Technology). Problem sessions will be held in the afternoons. The mathematical value lies both in the lectures and talks as well as in the discussions that take place between the talks, leading to new collaborations and mentoring relationships. More information can be found at the summer school website https://sites.gatech.edu/ttss23/ 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.