Conference: Mapping class groups and beyond

This award will support US researchers to attend the conference “Mapping Class Groups and Beyond” which will be held at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, on May 14-18, 2025. The conference will gather experts who either work on mapping class groups or on research areas with significant developments using mapping class groups, such as symplectic geometry, dynamics, and related fields.

By bringing these participants together, deeper understanding of their fields of study and new avenues of research will be developed. The potential collaborations resulting from the conference will broaden the research horizons of the different participant groups and produce novel research outcomes. This workshop will not only improve the exchange of ideas and the likelihood of collaboration between the countries most represented by the participants, but it will reinforce the cooperation between the US, Europe and Turkey, in general.

The mapping class group is an important algebraic invariant of a topological space; the mapping class group of a surface is the group of homotopy classes of orientation-preserving homeomorphisms of the surface. The study of mapping class group has recently progressed in new directions, with developments in big mapping class groups (which is the study of mapping class groups of infinite type surfaces and hierarchical hyperbolicity), and a systematic study of groups and spaces via axiomatizing properties of mapping class groups.

This conference will bring together researchers from different areas of geometry and topology, including those studying mapping class groups as they appear in symplectic geometry and in the study of Lefschetz fibrations. Conference details can be found at the website https://sites.google.com/view/mappingclassgroupsandbeyond/home?authuser=0

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.