Organizers: Peter Borwein (Simon Fraser University Department of Mathematics), H.W. Lenstra (University of California Berkeley Department of Mathematics), P. Stevenhagen (Mathematisch Instituut, Universiteit Leiden), H. Williams (Department of Mathematics, University of Calgary).
With this workshop, we intend to provide an opportunity for the participants to communicate recent developments in the various participating disciplines to experts in the same and in neigbouring areas. Furthermore, the workshop will facilitate and promote new and existing collaborations by giving an opportunity for participants to meet their colleagues in a relatively small, informal and intensive environment.
Developments in the participating areas are vast and quick. Many collaborations between physically distant researchers are ongoing and new results in one area often spark off new collaborations with researchers in other areas. The proposed meeting will give the participants an excellent platform for disseminating their results to a relevant audience and will give them a chance to absorb results by others. Recent meetings at MSRI and Oberwolfach have shown that the subject area is very much in flux and that there is a clear demand for more opportunities for dissemination and collaboration in this field.
Information technology industries have shown serious interest in computational number theory. Many number theoretic constructions find an application in cryptography or coding theory. Furthermore, the computational challenges offered by number theory give an excellent incentive and clear benchmarks for the computing industry to enhance hardware and the constant quest for faster algorithms enhances computational tools in general.
By organising a meeting on a smaller scale at BIRS rather than a large conference, better conditions are created to work out correspondences and relevant applications of presented results informally afterwards. We expect that the scientific spin-off of an intensive, informal and small-scale meeting will be more significant than that of a formal, big conference. The formula that BIRS offers matches with the intent of the proposed meeting and we would be delighted to be enabled to organise the proposed meeting at BIRS.