Conference: 2027 Mid-Atlantic Seminar On Numbers, MASON VIII

MASON VIII, the eighth Mid-Atlantic Seminar On Numbers conference, will be held April 3-4, 2027 at Towson University in Towson, Maryland. This award supports an established regional conference that brings together number theorists at all career stages from institutions throughout the Mid-Atlantic region. MASON addresses an important professional development need by providing an accessible, lower-cost, local alternative to larger national or international conferences, particularly for graduate students, undergraduates, and faculty at primarily undergraduate institutions who may lack funding or opportunities to attend major international meetings. The series has successfully built a vibrant regional community since 2016 by fostering collaboration and communication across research areas and institution types. The conference will follow a weekend format featuring three one-hour plenary lectures by distinguished number theorists, parallel sessions of contributed talks by attendees, and a moderated problem session. One plenary slot is reserved for an early-career mathematician to provide junior researchers with high-visibility speaking opportunities alongside established researchers. Plenary speakers will cover a broad range of number-theoretic topics chosen from analytic number theory, arithmetic geometry, and interactions with harmonic analysis and representation theory. NSF support enables participation by graduate students, undergraduate presenters, postdoctoral researchers, and early-career faculty who lack other funding. The meeting expects to attract 30-50 participants from research universities, liberal arts colleges, regional universities, and government agencies. More information can be found at https://wp.towson.edu/akumchev/mason/. 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.