Collaborative Research: Conference: Workshops in Geometric Topology

This award provides support for three meetings of a well-established series of summer Workshops in Geometric Topology, with the first to be held at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, MI, June 13-15, 2024. The award will also fund workshops at Oberlin College in 2025 and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2026. These workshops provide an annual opportunity for active researchers and graduate students in the mathematical field of geometric topology to interact in a setting that provides multiple tangible benefits, including: 1) attending the lectures of a principal speaker to receive an in-depth introduction to important current streams of research being performed by nationally-recognized experts, 2) learning about a breadth of other research activities by attending shorter talks given by the other workshop participants, 3) the opportunity to share their own work by giving talks in a congenial environment, and 4) important time for informal discussion and interaction among participants and with the principal speaker. These workshops regularly feature participation and talks by members of underrepresented groups in mathematics, and, to further broaden the impact of the workshops, the talks of the principal speaker will be recorded and posted to the internet. The workshops also provide significant benefits to graduate students by providing a serious but informal research atmosphere in which they can meet and learn from others in the field. NSF funding will be used to cover the attendance costs of workshop participants. More specifically, the workshops provide opportunities for geometric topologists to interact and share ideas, leading to research collaborations. Furthermore, the proposed workshops will continue the tradition of inviting each year a renowned principal speaker to provide a series of three lectures on a topic of his or her choice for the purpose of expanding the interests of the participants by having a nationally-recognized expert discuss an important area of current interest. The 2024 workshop will feature Professor Maggie Miller of the University of Texas -- Austin. The web site for this workshop will be https://sites.google.com/view/workshop2024/home. 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.