Conference: Young Topologists Meeting 2023

This award will fund US participants attending the fifth yearly installment of the Young Topologists Meeting (YTM) 2023 to be held at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale Lausanne taking place July 24 - 28, 2023. The YTM consists of mini-courses by distinguished researchers, and a line-up of 40 short talks and 40 poster presentations, mostly by graduate students. Being one of the largest conferences in the world dedicated to young researchers in this field, the YTM provides a unique opportunity for junior topologists to gain experience giving conference presentations to a wide audience, broaden their horizons by learning about subfields not represented at their institutions, expose their work to the international topology community, and develop collaborations with other young researchers. Furthermore, the YTM seeks to promote diversity by featuring graduate student speakers from underrepresented groups and from universities that are less well-represented in topology and by providing a friendly and welcoming community for students from all backgrounds. By funding US participants, the NSF is promoting the exchange of scientific ideas between the US and the international topology community, providing a setting for young topologists from the US to make research connections and develop relationships with their future international colleagues, as well as supporting a culture of diversity and inclusion. Two mini courses will be run by Katharine Turner (ANU) on Persistent Homology Transform (PHT), covering the mathematical theory behind these topological transforms, outlining some statistical methodology and also surveying a variety of nice applications from disease prognosis from the shapes of brain tumors to the identification of plants from their leaf contours, and by Marc Hoyois (Uni Regensberg) on motivic homotopy theory with a view towards the formalism of six functors. The latter is a general categorical framework for homology and cohomology devised by Grothendieck, which explains and generalizes many non-trivial facts like Poincaré duality and the Lefschetz trace formula. Participant-contributed talks and posters will cover a wide range of topics in topology, spanning higher algebra, homotopy theory, geometry, and applied topology. More information can be obtained from the conference website: https://ytm2023.epfl.ch/ 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.