Conference on Optimal Configurations on the Sphere and Other Manifolds

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This award provides support for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers participating in the twenty-fifth meeting in the series of Shanks Conferences and Lectures, held 17-20 May 2010 at Vanderbilt University. The conference encourages and financially supports participation by students, recent Ph.D. recipients, and members of groups underrepresented in mathematics.The conference centers on the structure of interacting systems under various physical constraints, with particular emphasis on systems of particles interacting through a pair-wise potential with motion restricted to the unit sphere of given dimension. The conference focuses on (a) relationships between geometrical, topological, and combinatorial properties of a manifold that are reflected in the asymptotics of minimal energy problems; (b) the analysis and development of statistical mechanical models from first principles; (c) tilings and Voronoi decompositions; (d) high-dimensional sphere packings; (e) the geometry of the structure of jammed and near optimal configurations; and (f) the asymptotics of the zeros of random polynomials. The meeting features a distinguished lecture by number theorist Noam Elkies, eight invited plenary speakers, special sessions for talks by other participants, and a poster session for graduate student research. The conference highlights significant recent developments and provides a forum for the participants to meet and jointly explore open problems of common interest in an informal atmosphere.Conference web site: http://www.math.vanderbilt.edu/~optimal2010/