Conference: Workshop on Automorphic Forms and Related Topics

The 36th Annual Workshop on Automorphic Forms and Related Topics (AFW) will take place May 20-24, 2024, at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, OK. The AFW is an internationally recognized, well-respected conference on topics related to automorphic forms, which have played a key role in many recent breakthroughs in mathematics. The AFW will bring together a geographically diverse group of participants at a wide range of career stages, from graduate students to senior professors.

Typically, about half of the attendees at the AFW are at early stages of their careers, and about one quarter to one third of participants are women. The AFW will continue to provide a supportive and encouraging environment for giving talks, exchanging ideas, and beginning new collaborations. This is the first time the AFW will meet in Oklahoma where many experts on automorphic forms and closely related topics are nearby.

Thus, in addition to attracting speakers who participate annually, the workshop is likely to draw a mix of new attendees who will contribute new perspectives and energy and benefit from the workshop. The workshop is known for its inclusive, encouraging atmosphere, particularly to early career researchers and to those from underrepresented groups in the number theory community.

The workshop has traditionally been a fruitful place for these researchers to connect with potential collaborators and mentors at other institutions, working on related topics. To help achieve this goal, the 2024 AFW will feature five expository talks on various fundamental topics in the theory of automorphic forms, aimed at the graduate student level. There will also be two panel discussions focused on mathematical career questions.

Automorphic forms play a central role in number theory, being integral to the proofs of many groundbreaking theorems, including Fermat's Last Theorem (by Andrew Wiles), the Sato-Tate Conjecture (by Thomas Barnet-Lamb, David Geraghty, Michael Harris, and Richard Taylor), Serre's Conjecture (by Chandrashekhar Khare, Mark Kisin, and Jean-Pierre Wintenberger), the Sato-Tate Conjecture (by Thomas Barnet-Lamb, David Geraghty, Michael Harris, and Richard Taylor), Serre's Uniformity Conjecture (by Yuri Bilu and Pierre Parent), and the Fundamental Lemma (for which Ngo Bau Chau was awarded the Fields Medal). Automorphic forms are the subject of many important ongoing conjectures, among them the Langlands program, connections to random matrix theory, and the generalized Riemann hypothesis.

They also appear in many areas of mathematics outside number theory, most notably in mathematical physics. The topics covered in this year's workshop are likely to include elliptic, Siegel, Hilbert, and Bianchi modular forms, elliptic curves and abelian varieties, special values of L-functions, p-adic aspects of L-functions and automorphic forms, connections with representation theory, mock modular forms, quadratic forms, connections with mathematical physics, monstrous moonshine, and additional related areas of research.

Additional information can be found on the conference website: http://automorphicformsworkshop.org/.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.