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The 2007 Midwest Geometry Conference will take place at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA from
Friday, May 18th through Sunday, May 20th.
Would you like to help us advertise the MGC 2007? Please, download conference poster!
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Main topics include
- conformal geometry: Q-curvature
- Lie theory and representations
- PDEs, geometric measure theory
- mathematical physics
- determinants of conformal operators on 4-manifolds
- geometric and harmonic analysis: spectral invariants
- p-harmonic geometry
- geometric flows
- complex and Riemannian geometry
- convex geometry, minimal varieties, symmetric criticality and algebraic geometry
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Rationale, background, and outlook:
Rationale : The conference will combine themes from geometry, physics, and symmetry.
To a large extent it is motivated by Tom's work which is distinguished as a highly original blend of these three elements.
Background: In the 1980s Tom's research on conformal invariance was significantly ahead of its time.
In all his research Tom utilized to a great effect the natural interplay between this invariance and the underlying symmetry groups.
Indeed, Tom's work continues to motivate and inspire a thriving and impressive international research effort.
These developments really took off and grew into active research trends in the 1990s, and they continue with even stronger momentum up to the present.
Many of the invited main speakers have contributed to the various research trends that Tom started.
Tom is especially known for introducing an extremely important and subtle quantity known as "Branson's Q-curvature,"
now seen as absolutely fundamental in conformal geometry. And then Tom's recent and very active work further developed Q-curvature,
and it pursued many other aspects of symmetry, invariance, and geometry too varied to list here; many include applications to physics.
The impact of what Tom started will always be felt.
Outlook: Finally, we stress that Tom's recent work on a specific class of conformally covariant operators
(nowadays often called Branson-Paneitz operators) has been extraordinarily influential, and it is widely cited.
For example, it has led to Tom's collaboration with Alice Chang and Paul Yang (both at Princeton) on the functional
determinants of the conformal Laplacians on 4-manifolds.
This work in turn has spun off several new trends in geometry and in mathematical physics which are again currently extremely active.
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| Partial funding is provided by |
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| This conference is supported in part by the Institute for Mathematics
and its Application (IMA) through its Participating Institution (PI) Program. PI members may use IMA/PI funds to support travel of their
personnel to this conference.
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