Topological and Geometric Rigidity (07w5094)

Organizers

(Indiana University)

(University of Chicago)

Description

A workshop uniting mathematicians of disparate disciplines will be meeting at BIRS during the week of July 29-August 3, 2007 to study various types of rigidity of geometric objects. The general theme is that if one has microscopic information about a space (like "what blocks it is made of") and knows something about its symmetries, then one can sometimes determine the full detailed structure of the space. The exciting web of conjectures and the techniques used to verify them in special cases involve many different fields of modern mathematics. These ideas have themselves had a number of important applications, for instance, to the notion of mass in general relativity. The topics developed here promise to shed light on the interaction of geometric phenomena at different scales.

This meeting is co-organized by James Davis of Indiana University and Shmuel Weinberger of the University of Chicago. It will be attended from close to forty mathematicians from Canada, the United States, Europe, and Asia.

The Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery (BIRS) is a collaborative Canada-US-Mexico venture that provides an environment for creative interaction as well as the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and methods within the Mathematical Sciences, with related disciplines and with industry. The research station is located at The Banff Centre in Alberta and is supported by Canada's Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the US National Science Foundation (NSF), Alberta's Advanced Education and Technology, and Mexico's Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT).