Participant Testimonials
I am deeply obliged to ... BIRS for an excellent organization of the workshop: Diophantine Approximation and Analytic Number Theory: A Tribute to Professor Cam Stewart. I enjoyed the workshop very much and learned a lot. It gives me a precious occasion to inspire myself. This workshop is one of the best one among those I have visited to.
I found the meeting both very useful and informative. As an NSF program officer it is nice to sometimes get away and just think about one's own research. This was an excellent facility for doing just that.
The workshop was indeed a great success. For me personally, my research was helped in the following ways: * I was able to continue in person an ongoing collaboration with Karl Dilcher, which will lead to a joint paper being submitted in the next couple of weeks; * I was able to discuss a problem relating to the density of values of n for which u_n is divisible by n with Igor Shparlinski. We have a joint draft paper which needs more 'beef', and we discussed how to do this. In connection with this problem, I also obtained some helpful references from Carl Pomerance on the distribution of pseudoprimes, with which our problem is connected. I also found out from Florian Luca that he has a student working in the same area, so that we have identified another potential collaborator. All-in-all a very helpful week research-wise. (I might add that I am now in Jasper on a side trip, so that my visit has had spinoff benefits ... to the Alberta economy.) Thank you again for the opportunity to visit BIRS.
BIRS has proven to be the envy of research institutes around the world, and I hope that our report will contribute to showing the investors of BIRS that important groundbreaking discoveries are regularly occurring during and subsequent to all BIRS workshops. It is my understanding that the list of such investors includes the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. With the help of my co-organizers, I am very glad to inform you that the conference met with enormous success, by account of all of the participants, many of whom are regarded as world leaders in their respective research areas. At the time that I submitted my proposal to BIRS, my research programme involved quite a number of research colleagues, evidenced by the number of co-authors I have had in the past few years. Specifically, I was able to use my grant funds to make these connections, and collaborate in a mutually productive manner with quite a number of members of our research community. Since that time, NSERC's new policies regarding the use of grant funds by Adjunct Professors has already, and will continue to have, a devastating impact on my own ability to conduct research, and it is my hope that a more productive approach will result by way of a change to the current restrictions. Despite the above, I will try my best to continue to engage in activities that will hopefully have a positive impact on Mathematics in Canada, one of them being the organization of workshops that bring together world class researchers, young researchers, and also, hopefully, those active researchers who have recently lost their research funding as a result of NSERC's new restrictions.
