Recent Progress in Rigidity Theory (08w2137)

Objectives

It is timely for key contributors to these areas as well as junior researchers, and graduate students to spend some time assessing the recent progress, as well as comparing unsolved problems and conjectures.

The objective of the two day workshop is to pull together surveys of key recent progress on results, and techniques, and to share conjectures and unsolved problems. The goal is make connections between the techniques, the conjectures, and the problems, to map out likely directions for progress in the near future, as well as encourage new collaborations to advance the theory and its applications. The interplay between the theory of rigidity and its applications has been particularly fruitful and we believe that this will continue. The potential for further contributions often lies in further progress on these problems. We will ask key people to share conjectures/problems, along with key relevant references, in advance of the workshop.

In 2004, we held a similar two day follow-on workshop (in Calgary) to the previous 5 day BIRS workshop. This was quite successful in firming up the mathematical insights floating in the interdisciplinary BIRS discussions, as well as drawing from the broader range of problems in rigidity. This workshop is propose to directly follow the 5 day workshop 08w5104 on Rigidity, Flexibility, and Motion: Theory, Computation and Applications to Biomolecules (July 5-11). It would be timely for these key people to remain, and to invite additional people (not included in the restricted list for the 5 day BIRS workshop) to join us for a more intensive weekend of more general rigidity discussions.