West Coast Algebraic Topology Summer School

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AbstractAward: DMS-1106865Principal Investigator: Dev Sinha, Ralph CohenThe principal organizers will be program organizers for aone-week summer school program in algebraic topology, to behosted at the University of Oregon. This summer school will bringthirty graduate students and early-career mathematicians togetherfor an introduction to an area in topology which is ripe forinvestigation, and whose techniques will inform and inspiredevelopments throughout topology. This summer school will use aunique blend of pedagogical tools, combining elements which havebeen successful in other settings. Younger researchers will beinvolved with both organizing and giving talks. Attendees will beencouraged to work problems, fill in background, and do readingtogether in addition to attending lectures.The West Coast Topology Summer School continues a series thatbegan in summer 2010 and will strengthen the knowledge base oftopologists and others who use topology and build a cohort ofjunior researchers familiar with recent developments in thesubject. The program organizers of the Summer School are theprincipal investigators, together with Alejandro Adem of theUniversity of British Columbia and the Pacific Institute ofMathematical Sciences (PIMS). PIMS is a partner in the project,which will bring together US--based graduate students, largelyfrom the western United States, and Canadian graduate studentssponsored by PIMS. In its role as a basic study of shape,topology has significant ramifications in other areas ofmathematics, from basic counting problems (combinatorics) tosolutions of equations (algebra) to applications and extensionsof the calculus (analysis). More broadly, knowledge of topologyis essential for example in studying the structure of the earlyuniverse, in designing a robot arm with a minimal number ofcontrollers, and in searching large data sets for meaningfulgroupings as successfully done recently for study of breastcancer. This summer school will strengthen the ties between basicareas of theoretical mathematics. Mathematicians fromunderrepresented backgrounds will be vigorously recruited.Graduate students and post-docs will gain hands-on experiencewith some of the most important developments of contemporarymathematics, preparing them to be future leaders of the field.Participants will enlarge their professional networks, which isespecially critical given the geographical distances faced bymathematicians in the western half of North America. Organizersand participants will also have the opportunity to reflect uponthe array of pedagogical tools employed, and might employ somethemselves in training graduate students and undergraduates orreaching out to fellow scientists and the general public.