Conference: Geometry and Topology of Polyhedral Complexes

This award will provide funding support for a conference entitled “Geometry and Topology of Polyhedral Complexes” taking place at Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio on May 26–30, 2025. The conference will cover topics in geometric group theory, geometric topology, and metric geometry, and feature some of the most recent developments in these fields. The conference will also serve to provide an environment for participants to engage in discussions and initiate collaborations. The award will cover travel expenses for US based participants with priority given to graduate students and postdocs. A significant portion of speakers will be in their early careers and will have an opportunity to advertise their work and raise their profiles. The main theme of the conference is the study of polyhedral complexes in geometry and topology. Recent developments in geometric group theory and geometric topology have led to new ways of thinking about these complexes, and ways to use them to build examples in geometry, topology, and group theory. The list of topics covered by the conference include notions of non-positive curvature on polyhedral complexes and its implications in the context of group actions; rigidity properties of groups acting on polyhedral complexes; fibering of complexes and groups; Artin groups, Coxeter groups and hyperplane arrangement complements. This conference invites geometric group theorists, geometers, and topologists who are interested in polyhedral complexes to communicate major recent developments, in the hope of stimulating further research in this direction. The conference website is https://sites.google.com/view/gtpc2025/ 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.