Spring Topology and Dynamics Conference 2002, at the University of Texas at Austin on March 21-23, 2002

cameron M. gordon：德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校数学系将主办2002春季拓扑与动力学会议。今年是第36届，这是美国最大的年度拓扑会议。它的范围很广，包括集合论和一般拓扑学、连续论和动力系统、几何群论和几何拓扑学。因此，它为拓扑学中广泛学科的研究人员提供了一个独特的论坛。将有八个邀请全体一小时的半说明性讲座，由所涵盖领域的主要研究人员给出。此外，还将邀请20个半小时的讲座，以及15分钟的专题讲座，分四个平行会议进行。邀请发言者是在各分领域专家咨询委员会的帮助下选定的。拓扑学是数学的主要分支学科之一，也是最年轻的分支学科，只有一百多年的历史。它起源于1900年左右的亨利·庞加莱（Henri Poincare），他将其作为描述某些物理系统（例如我们的太阳系）定性行为的一种手段，这些系统的复杂性使得精确的定量分析变得过于困难。今天这一主题所涵盖的广泛范围在会议上得到了很好的体现。一般拓扑研究的是拓扑空间的抽象性质；集合论拓扑学冲击着数学的逻辑基础。动力系统的研究接近庞加莱的原始动机，并处理各种迭代过程的行为。这些通常会产生复杂的对象，即连续体，这些对象本身就是研究对象。几何拓扑学研究流形，流形是局部类似于n维欧几里得空间的物体，但其整体结构可能相当复杂。例如，目前在三维拓扑中有很多活动，其目标本质上是描述所有理论上可能的三维宇宙。近年来，人们发现这门学科与量子物理学之间存在着丰富的联系，而另一方面，来自三维空间结理论的拓扑技术最近也被应用于DNA的研究。最后，几何群论是一门相对较新的学科，它从拓扑学的角度研究群这一代数对象；这导致了拓扑学和代数之间的深刻联系。在会议上，所有这些不同拓扑分支的工作人员之间的互动预计将非常富有成果。

DMS-0129227Cameron M. GordonThe Department of Mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin will host the 2002 Spring Topology and Dynamics Conference. Now in its 36th year, this is the largest annual topology conference in the US. It has a broad scope that encompasses set-theoretic and general topology, continuumtheory and dynamical systems, geometric group theory and geometric topology. It thus provides a unique forum for researchers in a wide range of disciplines within topology. There will be eight invited plenary one-hour lectures of a semi-expository nature, given by leading researchers in the areas covered. There will also be twenty invited half-hour lectures, together with 15-minute contributed talks, held infour parallel sessions. The invited speakers have been selected with the help of an advisory committee of experts in the various subfields.Topology is one of the major subdisciplines of mathematics, and, at just over a hundred years old, the youngest. It originated with Henri Poincare around 1900, who introduced it as a means of describing the qualitative behavior of certain physical systems (for example, our solar system),whose complexity renders a precise quantitative analysis too difficult. The wide range covered by the subject today is well represented by the Conference. General topology deals with the abstract properties of topological spaces; set-theoretictopology impinges upon the logical foundations of mathematics. The study of dynamical systems is close to Poincare's original motivation, and deals with the behavior of various iterative processes. These often give rise to complex objects, continua,which are studied in their own right. Geometric topology deals with manifolds, objects which are locally like n-dimensional Euclidean space, but whose global structure might be quite complicated. For instance, there is a lot of current activity in 3-dimensional topology, whose goal isessentially to describe all theoretically possible 3-dimensional universes. Rich connections have recently been discovered between this subject and quantum physics, while on the other hand topological techniques from the theory of knots in 3-dimensional space have recently been applied to the study of DNA. Finally, geometric group theory, a relatively new subject, studies groups, which are algebraic objects, from a topological point of view; this is leading to deep connections between topology and algebra. The interaction at the Conference between workers in all these different branches of topology is expected to be very fruitful.