Conference: Actions on graphs and metric spaces

This award will support U.S.-based students and early-career researchers to participate the workshop entitled “Actions on graphs and metric spaces” as part of the “Operators, graphs, groups” program at the Isaac Newton Institute of the University of Cambridge from September 1 through September 5, 2025. The workshop will focus on the study of groups, which are collections of transformations of objects that preserve certain geometric properties. The workshop will bring together leading experts to share recent advancements and explore new research directions. The interdisciplinary nature of the workshop, combined with the broader thematic semester, will facilitate communication among U.S. students and leading experts across multiple mathematical fields and enhance STEM education at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The topic of the workshop is studying groups via their actions on graphs and metric spaces that satisfy various notions of non-positive curvature, such as the CAT(0) condition introduced by Alexandrov and the hyperbolicity condition defined by Gromov. Such a strategy has been successfully employed to study fundamental groups of 3-manifolds, as well as to explore the possible complexity of groups, leading to the resolution of the celebrated Virtual Haken Conjecture and the Day–von Neumann Conjecture. For more information, please visit https://www.newton.ac.uk/event/oggw02/. 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.