Geometry, Rigidity, and Group Actions

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AbstractAward: DMS-0734851Principal Investigator: Benson FarbThe conference "Geometry, Rigidity, and Group Actions" will bringtogether researchers in a cluster of fields related to actions oflattices in semisimple Lie groups. The subject's roots concernlinear representations of lattices, but developments in the pasttwo decades have established strong connections with a variety ofother topics, including ergodic theory, dynamics of group actionson compact manifolds, differential geometry, spaces ofnon-positive curvature, geometric group theory, symplecticgeometry, algebraic groups, unitary representation theory,operator algebras, and group cohomology. Our lectures willinclude contributions from all of these areas. We are holdingthe conference on the occasion of Robert J. Zimmer's 60thbirthday, in recognition of his work's dramatic impact on thegrowth of this area.The speaker list of this conference cuts across a variety ofclosely related areas of mathematics, and will presentparticipants with the opportunity to learn about recentdevelopments, important open questions, and the wide variety ofsuccessful techniques that are being applied. New developmentsare emerging rapidly and involve ideas from disparate areas ofmathematics, so conferences of this type are necessary to keepestablished researchers up to date, and are even more valuablefor young researchers who are entering this fast-paced,interdisciplinary research area. A Sunday-afternoon workshop willprovide younger scholars with an opportunity to present theirwork and discuss it with other conference participants.Additional information is available from the conference web siteat http://www.math.uchicago.edu/zimmer60/