Travel: AF: Small: NSF Student Travel Grant for ISSAC 2024 & Precursor Macaulay2 Mini-School

The International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation (ISSAC) is internationally recognized as the leading annual conference on symbolic computation, computer algebra, and related topics. ISSAC has been held annually since 1981 and attracts worldwide experts in the field including both computer scientists and computational mathematicians. This year ISSAC will have a satellite Macaulay2 mini-school targeted at early career researchers with extensive workshops and other activities to help connect them with the community and inspire future research. Macaulay2 is a widely used, internationally recognized, and actively developed free and open source computer algebra system for computations in algebraic geometry and commutative algebra, and hence is a natural ecosystem for many of the research areas represented at the ISSAC conference. The purpose of this travel grant is to enable students without other means of support to attend these events, both of which will be hosted on campus at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, USA. This funding will facilitate a unique and impactful opportunity for US based students to attend both events and to interact with their colleagues and peers from the international community, including with leading experts in their fields. This opportunity will have a lasting positive impact on the careers of these students for years to come. This grant will fund 15 students to attend ISSAC 2024, and five students to attend the satellite Macaulay2 mini-school. 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.