Conference: Dynamics and Rigidity

This award provides support for U.S.-based participants of a research conference on dynamics and rigidity, which will take place at the conference center of the Hotel San Michele in Cetraro, Italy. By bringing together experts from various subareas of dynamics, as well as researchers who have applied related methods in groundbreaking ways, the conference aims to foster collaborations across mathematical communities with the ultimate goal of making progress on longstanding problems. An emphasis will be placed on supporting young researchers, with all NSF funds dedicated to providing travel and lodging support for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars. The conference will include professional development panels addressing academic publishing, grant writing, and work-life balance. In addition, organizers will proactively recruiting attendees from a comprehensive range of experts in various stages of their career. Dissemination of knowledge will be ensured through the public availability of resources prepared by the speakers, allowing the broader mathematical community to benefit from the conference's outcomes. The last several years have seen an unprecedented number of breakthroughs in geometry and dynamics, including the resolution of the Zimmer conjecture, the classification of higher rank orbit closures in strata of Abelian differentials, and the classification of hyperbolic manifolds admitting infinitely many totally geodesic hypersurfaces. Many of these results were direct consequences of new discoveries of rigidity phenomenon in dynamical systems, including the classification of stationary measures following work of Benoist-Quint and applications of Margulis functions as in work of Eskin-Mirzakhani-Mohammadi. The goal of this conference is to bring together experts in rigidity phenomenon and dynamics from several communities, including smooth, homogeneous, and Teichmuller dynamics, together with mathematicians who have successfully applied such results to solve longstanding questions with an eye toward jump-starting collaborations between groups of experts with similar interests and bringing about new and exciting developments. The conference website is https://sites.google.com/view/eskin2025. 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.